At 10:40 PM 27/01/06, Eira wrote: >I live in Bristol and have a reader's ticket for the Friends' Library. Who >is Howard? I am the coordinator of the Quaker FHS project to index the Digests of birth, marriage and burial. In fact what we have published for Suffolk, Norfolk and (imminently) Essex is a full transcription, as is the work so far done for London & Middlesex. Publication of images of the original registers would certainly be valuable but they are of course with TNA. Images of the Digests would, to my mind, be less valuable and would definitely need indexes. The work is being done by volunteers (all too few of them, unfortunately) mainly at home. The method is to get photocopies of the Digest pages from microfilm and the entries are then transcribed onto computer by one volunteer, the results are then printed out and sent to another volunteer who checks them against the photocopies. The remaining queries are then resolved by reference to the actual Digest books (which are not available to researchers) at Friends House Library. Then it is a matter of compiling the CD, so far one for each Quarterly Meeting. The concept is that when all of them are complete one combined index will be compiled, but it will be many years before that can be thought of. At present I have fewer volunteers who are prepared to input the Digest entries to computer than to carry out the checking. The input of London & Middlesex births and marriages is complete but there remains a lot to be done on burials. In some ways they are more interesting than you might think as until a fairly late date (we are talking about the 1600s up to 1837) the London & Middlesex Digests usually give a cause of death, perhaps guesswork in at least some cases. Is that something you would be willing to help with? All that's needed is a little time, a computer (which you evidently have) and a spreadsheet. A magnifying glass can be helpful. As I am quite near Bristol myself (Portishead) we could have a chat about it quite easily, by phone (01275 845113) or otherwise. Howard