Was just out looking at some World Archives stats and am thrilled to report that there has been significant progress. 8 million records have now been keyed by more than 9,000 contributors! Here’s a list of projects that are currently being keyed:Â
- Cartes postales historiques – France [Historic Postcards]
- England and Wales, Criminal Registers, 1805-1892
- England, Newspaper Index Cards (Andrews)
- Nebraska State Census, 1885
- New England Naturalization Indexes
- New York Naturalization Indexes
- NYC Naturalization Indexes
- Southern California Naturalization Indexes
- Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Piemonte, Italy: Marriage and Death Records
To lear more, check out the free webinar that was held on the World Archives Project in the Learning Center webinar archive. There is also a new article on Reading Old Handwriting in the Help section of Ancestry.com, that is useful both in keying for the World Archive Project and in reading the handwriting we’re faced with in our research.
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All this World Archives additions are great, but is any attention being made to updating the IGI on familysearch.org, especially the extracted records ? Specifically:
– providing some simple way to search and filter out all the unsourced ‘LDS member’ submissions, which many of us are extremely reluctant to use as facts.
– re-transcribing many of the microfilms to transcribe and post (on the web) the many birth, christening and marriage entries which don’t appear on the web
– re-transcribing many of the microfilms to transcribe the overwhelming number of death/burial entries which are currently ignored
– providing some mechanism to report (and correct) erroneous links on familysearch (i.e., marriage indexes in England where the Source link points to a Dutch record)
As valuable as the familysearch/IGI is – as a basic reference and a pointer to the films – there is still a lot of solid data on the films which is not reflected on the web, so is potentially unavailable.