Using a well known saying from our ancestors day I would like to ask our members, non-members or anyone willing if they would consider helping out with our projects.
The projects we have undertaken with specific emphasis on the Baptism Project in cooperation with our partners at S&N have been a significant revenue source for the Society over many years and continues to be so. This has enabled us to keep membership fees unchanged, subsidise trips and fund refreshments at our monthly meetings as well as inviting some excellent speakers. In short for a small society like ours it has been a welcome lifeline and as long as we can keep them going they will continue to be.
However in the last few months their has been a significant reduction in transcribers mainly with the Baptism Project. This is in a way quite understandable with the majority of the records in Phase 3, in old English and/or Latin. Vanessa Foy our Projects Leader tells me however that there is quite a bit still in ‘normal’ English and she has separated out those that are a little easier from others which are a little more tricky. She does though provide some basic instruction on Latin and old English which accompany the details and records she sends out so you can relatively easily transcribe them as the names and reference etc are very repetitive. To also help out we can sometimes arrange some short courses on Latin and old English to assist which a number of our members have attended and found very helpful with the transcribing.
As well as the Baptism Project, which we would now like to see, if we can completed in the near future, have the burial registers to transcribe not only for our benefit but the local authority and they are all I believe in plain English – well relatively! We are also hoping to progress further with Monumental Inscriptions although this is still in its infancy.
None of this is to say we are in a rush to do all these, we are not, people quite rightly work at their own pace and it takes as long as it takes, but we could do with some more helpers. So the appeal is to ask you if you would consider helping Vanessa out. Please don’t be put off especially by the old records because just like me you can leave it if the record is too difficult to interpret as these will be given to those with more expertise in this area and they focus on these to help out. So it’s about just doing what you can.
We have made some wonderful progress and a big thank you goes to everyone from the committee who has helped out in any way but now we need to recruit some more people to continue to move forward a little more.
If you are not already helping out with these projects please give it your consideration and if you would like to join us or look into it a bit more then please contact Vanessa whose details are on the back cover and she will be delighted to hear from you.
Mike Speed
