Text by Gillian Stevens (Federation of Family History Societies), Images from live transcription tool from findmypast.com
If you wish to take part in this project, please register your interest using the email link at the bottom of this page.
A little more work is needed to optimise the images and text.
The transcription Tool is protected by a user name and a password
Signing in will take you to the main administration page. From here you can see:
To get started you will need to Open a Batch (a batch is the image of one page of an enumerators census book). You do this by either clicking on the box Check Out New Batch or by using the menu bar near the top of the screen File. Several batches can be checked out so that you can obtain a run of images all in the same enumerator's handwriting.
When you have obtained one or more batches, click on the name of a batch (e.g. Image No 3199) to take you to the transcription page.
Note: you can also use the File menu Batch at the top of the screen.
The image will appear in the top half of the screen. The image can be increased and decreased in size by clicking on the magnifying glasses, + or - icons on the menu bar or can be dragged around by clicking on the hand icon on the menu bar.
In the bottom half of the screen is the transcription area. The left hand side contains boxes relating to the fields that need transcribing and the right hand side gives online help tips for each field, lookup tables and submissions (more about this area later.)
The transcription area is split into two (see the tabs labelled Header and Rows). We will start by looking at the Header tab. This area is used to transcribe the details from the top of the page such as the folio number, page number, parish, town, etc., together with the page totals from the bottom of the page. If you compare the right hand box of this screen shot with the one above you will see that as we are now transcribing the information needed for the Folio field and the help tip has changed to show information about the Folio field.
All the details have now been filled from the header of the page and we have also filled in the total numbers of males and females from the bottom of the page so we can now move on by clicking on the Rows tab
We are now in the Rows area and we can now start transcribing each entry row for the page.
Twelve rows have now been completed. After we have done the final seven rows we will be able to submit the batch by clicking on the submit tab in the right hand box. It will check that we have filled in all the rows (checking the number of persons previously entered against the actual number entered – this can be overridden if the enumerator had made an error) and that we have filled in something for each field (we should have positively marked the above Title fields as blank so it will comment on this).
The Lookup tab in the right hand box can be used to help a transcriber with a Street, a given name, a surname or a place. Family history societies will be able to offer findmypast.com a list (if they have one) to add to the dictionary which has been collected by reference to other censuses.
To register to your interest please email with your contact details and any counties or areas where you have a particular knowledge or interest. Not all counties and areas are available because some societies have declined to take part and for others a complete (or almost complete) as-enumerated census is already available.
Copyright 2008 Federation of Family History Societies (text), Findmypast.com Ltd. (transcription tool) and the Crown for census image fragments.