Hello Everyone
In the December 2011 issue of Your Family Tree pp20-23 there is an article about transferring information from Microform (Microfilm or Microfiche) to digital image files. Whilst the whole concept is interesting in itself there is one particular paragraph, where the author of the article was talking to the staff at Worcestershire Record Office, which is of particular interest to those of us who are researching Shropshire ancestors.
It reads, "... the majority of the work we do at Worcestershire is external now. We're working with Shropshire Record Office * to digitise 4,000 parish registers."
* This should really read Shropshire Archives.
I don't know any more about this beyond the details above but it is certainly something to look forward to in the future.
Mike
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Agreed - it would be great to see the Shropshire PRs scanned, transcribed, indexed and online, particularly if the transcriptions are accurate!
This seems to tie in what I saw when I was visiting the Archives back in September, when there were notices stating that some original registers may be unavailable while they were being scanned. The member of staff I asked about this at the time said that it would be a while before the scanned registers would be online, and she was not able to confirm whether they would be online with Findmypast or Ancestry.
While FMP transcriptions certainly aren't faultless, my experience has been that they are better than those produced by Ancestry so I'm hoping FMP will take on the Shropshire PRs. They would go nicely with the Cheshire records that went live at FMP recently, and with the long-awaited Welsh PRs which should come online there over the course of 2012.
Steve