QUAKER-BRITISH-ISLES-L Archives

Archiver > QUAKER-BRITISH-ISLES > 2006-01 > 1138454099


From: Howard M Knight <>
Subject: Re: [Q-B-I] Quaker cd's
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 13:14:59 +0000
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At 10:40 PM 27/01/06, Eira wrote:
>I live in Bristol and have a reader's ticket for the Friends' Library. Who
>is Howard?

I am the coordinator of the Quaker FHS project to index the Digests of
birth, marriage and burial. In fact what we have published for Suffolk,
Norfolk and (imminently) Essex is a full transcription, as is the work so
far done for London & Middlesex. Publication of images of the original
registers would certainly be valuable but they are of course with
TNA. Images of the Digests would, to my mind, be less valuable and would
definitely need indexes.

The work is being done by volunteers (all too few of them, unfortunately)
mainly at home. The method is to get photocopies of the Digest pages from
microfilm and the entries are then transcribed onto computer by one
volunteer, the results are then printed out and sent to another volunteer
who checks them against the photocopies. The remaining queries are then
resolved by reference to the actual Digest books (which are not available
to researchers) at Friends House Library. Then it is a matter of compiling
the CD, so far one for each Quarterly Meeting. The concept is that when
all of them are complete one combined index will be compiled, but it will
be many years before that can be thought of.

At present I have fewer volunteers who are prepared to input the Digest
entries to computer than to carry out the checking. The input of London &
Middlesex births and marriages is complete but there remains a lot to be
done on burials. In some ways they are more interesting than you might
think as until a fairly late date (we are talking about the 1600s up to
1837) the London & Middlesex Digests usually give a cause of death, perhaps
guesswork in at least some cases.

Is that something you would be willing to help with? All that's needed is
a little time, a computer (which you evidently have) and a spreadsheet. A
magnifying glass can be helpful.

As I am quite near Bristol myself (Portishead) we could have a chat about
it quite easily, by phone (01275 845113) or otherwise.

Howard

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