Tuesday 17 July 2012

Lord Morpeth's 1841 Roll needs more transcribers

More volunteers are needed to help transcribe a document that dates from 1841 and contains the names of some 275,000 people from all over Ireland – in other words, a treasure that goes some way to mitigating the loss of the census of that year.

The document – a continuous roll of 652 pages wound around an enormous mahogany spool – is on display at NUI Maynooth's Russell Library and is now the focus of an important scholarly investigation with research led by Dr Patrick Cosgrove.

The conservation project has since moved to the transcription stage, which is being carried out in collaboration with Ancestry.com as part of that company's World Archives Project. It is now some 40% completed, but Ancestry have just put out a call for more help.

If you've a mind to be among the first to view this historical document and can help out with indexing the handwritten names, take a look at the project notes. The transcription work is described as of Average difficulty and you can see an example of the document here.

More about Lord Morpeth's Roll.