Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine readers completed a project to transcribe the records of a 19th century lunatic asylum in another successful Transcription Tuesday event.
WDYTYA? Magazine has held Transcription Tuesday every year since 2017.
We encourage our readers to join us in supporting four volunteer projects to transcribe family history records, transcribing the records online and sharing their experiences on social media.
This year, readers completed 860 record transcriptions for the Parkside Asylum project, which transcribes the records of Parkside Asylum in Macclesfield, Cheshire. This meant the first phase of the project was 100% complete.
Our second project was Get To Know Medieval Londoners, a project to transcribe medieval court records. Our volunteers transcribed 251 records, crossing the 90% completion mark on the workflow.
Project lead Grace Campagna of Fordham University Graduate School in New York said: "Transcription Tuesday was a wonderful opportunity to bring a new audience to our project. Participants had great discussions with each other and with the project team, and helped us identify important new material to add to our research guides.”
For our third project, Civil War Bluejackets, volunteers transcribed crew records from the Union Navy in the American Civil War. 245 records were transcribed altogether.
Project lead Dr Damian Shiels of Northumbria University said: "We were delighted to be involved in Transcription Tuesday, and saw a major boost in records transcribed thanks to the new volunteers. We really enjoyed the engagement through the day as well! Thanks to everyone who participated, and to Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine for all their hard work."
For the fourth project, we worked with free family history website FamilySearch to transcribe English merchant crew lists from 1857, where we successfully transcribed 72,812 records.
Many readers shared their enjoyment of Transcription Tuesday on social media:
Rosemary Collins is the features editor of Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine
