Tagged: Volunteers

We’ve recently announced an exciting new phase of the ‘Material Culture of Wills’ project – the launch of our Zooniverse site, a ‘crowdsourcing’ platform that is enabling us to involve hundreds of new volunteers in the project, working with us to transcribe our sample of 25,000 English wills made between 1540 and 1790. Volunteering for the project […]

We’re delighted to announce an exciting new phase of the ‘Material Culture of Wills’ project – the launch of our Zooniverse site. We hope that the Zooniverse ‘crowdsourcing’ platform will allow us to involve hundreds of new volunteers in the project who will work with us to transcribe our sample of 25,000 English wills made […]

In this month’s post, one of our Expert Volunteers shares a fascinating will that he transcribed as part of our project. Austen Hamilton, Project Volunteer This month’s post explores the will of Thomas Pechill, esquire of Normanton in Lincolnshire, which was composed in September 1665.1 Pechill died within a few months of making his will, […]

Generously funded by the University of Exeter’s Public Engagement with Research Fund. Many thanks to the knowledgeable and generous attendees at our two recent workshops (June 2024) at The National Archives and the University of Exeter. Both days were marked by lively conversations and the fruitful exchange of ideas have kindled plenty more flames to […]

In this month’s post, one of our Expert Volunteers shares her research into one of the wills she came across when transcribing pages for our project. Liz Wood, archivist and project volunteer There is a formula, a routine, to official copies of probate records. The same impersonal clerical hand, standard phrases about mind, bodily health […]

Laura Sangha It’s safe to say that the Wills Project wouldn’t be possible without drawing on the skills and knowledge of a wide variety of volunteer ‘citizens’ – or rather, if we were to attempt our project alone it would take decades, rather than the four years that we have funding for. People power fuels […]

Harry Smith  In this blog post, Research Fellow Harry Smith provides an overview of some of the innovative digital methods used by our project. Read on to find out more about the digitisation of manuscript sources, and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automatic transcription can be used to improve access to handwritten documents such as […]

Hello, and welcome to our first ‘Project Progress’ blog post. In this blog post you will find an overview of some of the things we’ve been up to since the project launched in November 2023, and we look ahead to some exciting activities happening over the next few months.