AUS-VIC-DANDENONG-RANGES-L Archives

From: Jan & Barry Shaw <>
Subject: [AVDR] THE FREEBMD PROJECT
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 12:35:07 +1100

Hello everyone,

With the success of this project to date particularly since the latter half of
last year, I thought some of you would like to know a little more about the
project and how it's been progressing.

FreeBMD stands for Free Births, Marriages, and Deaths. The FreeBMD Project's
objective is to provide free Internet access to the Civil Registration index
information for England and Wales. The Civil Registration system for recording
births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales has been in place since 1837
and is one of the most significant single resources for genealogical research
back to Victorian times.

The FreeBMD Project will place Civil Registration index information on the
Internet for free access and is kindly hosted by RootsWeb.

My task as a volunteer transcriber is to type up information from the Indexes
which has been assigned to me by a co-ordinator. In my case I am with the Scan
Syndicate which means that hand-written or typed pages are scanned into a
computer and then I download these scanned pages from the Rootsweb site, print
them up and key the information into a software program which has been
specifically designed for this project. When completed, I go back to the
Rootsweb site and upload the entries which I understand are freely available for
searching on the internet within a day or so.

Volunteer transcribers have to date uploaded about 1.3 million names. With
approx. 100 million entries up to 1900, you can see it will take a while to
complete the project but the organisers of FreeBMD are always welcoming new
volunteers (currently a little under 300). There is no minimum number of entries
you have to transcribe, just whatever time you can put into this project is very
much appreciated

So if you feel this is a worthwhile project and wish to participate just go to
the FreeBMD web page at http://FreeBMD.rootsweb.com to register. Or
alternatively you can go to http://FreeBMD.rootsweb.com/statgraphs just to take
a look at the progress of the project.

I hope some of you will consider participating.

Talk soon.

Jan Shaw,
Listowner: AUS-VIC-DANDENONG-RANGES
Email:
Transcriber of FreeBMD at Rootsweb

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• [AVDR] THE FREEBMD PROJECT by Jan & Barry Shaw <>