Tithe Award Transcriptions

The Friends have been working on a project to transcribe the contents of Somerset’s Tithe Apportionments for some time now.

The Tithe Apportionments were photographed by Ann, the then Chairman, and Robin Leaman, the Tithe Project leader, of the Friends. Ann and Robin deserve great praise for devoting a lot of time to this project.

Volunteers have been transcibing data from these photographic images into a word processor, for textual information, and a spreadsheet format, for tabular data. We have well over one hundred parish apportionments transcribed and these are available to view, currently on CD-Rom, in the Heritage Centre.

This is a big project which will take some time to complete, but it is seen as of the utmost importance in that it will gives users of the Heritage Centre a tremendously large and detailed source of information.

It is a project that can involve all members, whether they can visit the Heritage Centre or not - even if they are living abroad. Good use of technology is the key.

At the start of the project, the images for the particular parish to be transcribed were distributed along with empty data computer files on CD-ROMS to the volunteer. We have more recently progressed to sending out processed photographs by email along with empty data files, sample data files and instructions.

Anyone can take part anywhere, as long as they have a computer. If email is not available, files can be sent as they were originally using CD-Rom and post.

Jenni is now in charge of the Tithe Transciption Project and she can be reached by email here - or her details can be found in the 'Your Committee' section of this site.

Please consider helping with the transcriptions! We still have a lot to do and the more help that is available, the quicker the job can be completed.

It is hoped that the database of tithe apportionments might be available online in due course.