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Your family history society need volunteers. Here’s what actually works.

It’s Volunteers’ Week in the UK, and the Family History Federation has marked the occasion with a special edition of its Really Useful Bulletin: eighteen upbeat testimonials and a roundup of volunteer openings across member societies. Scroll through the listings, and the picture is alarming. Among 21 of the Federation’s 162 member societies profiled, four are hunting for a chair, four for a treasurer, five for a secretary, three for a membership secretary, and five more for help with social media or communications.

This is not unique to genealogy. It’s a feature of volunteer-run organizations everywhere, and it always has been. So what actually works? I put the question to AI, which summarised the research neatly: successful recruitment shifts away from mass appeals toward targeted, bite-sized, and relationship-driven invitations. Which will ring true to anyone who’s watched a newsletter plea vanish without a single reply.

Break the big roles into smaller ones. “Treasurer” frightens people. It conjures full financial responsibility, legal exposure, and hours of continuing commitment. But most treasurer roles are really a cluster of smaller tasks — processing payments, reconciling a spreadsheet, filing an annual return — that different people could share or rotate. The Webmaster role can almost always be split into a content updater, a social media poster, and someone handling back-end admin. Co-chairs and job-sharing work for the same reason: they halve the perceived burden and eliminate the fear of being stranded alone in a demanding post.

A try-before-you-commit offer also lowers the barrier to entry. Invite prospective volunteers to shadow a current officer for a couple of months or to attend two or three committee meetings, with no obligation to continue. Many people who would never respond to a general appeal will say yes to something that feels bounded and reversible. That’s no guarantee they’ll continue, but as in baseball, a .300 batting average is excellent

Ask specific people directly. General appeals are easy to ignore. Readers assume someone else will step up. A warm, personal conversation from a board member is far more effective, especially when the ask is tailored: “We noticed how well you organized the seminar last autumn — would you be willing to help coordinate registrations for the next one?”

When members join or renew, include a short optional checklist of their professional backgrounds: accounting, IT, project management, copyediting, design. Not a generic “tick here to volunteer” box, but a skills inventory. It lets you make private, targeted approaches later, which feel flattering rather than desperate.

Make the personal rewards concrete. Altruism gets people through the door, but it rarely keeps them. What does it is the realization that volunteering delivers tangible benefits: friendships with people who share an obsession, the mental engagement of learning new tools, the satisfaction of being genuinely useful to a community you care about. For genealogical societies, there is a specific and powerful hook: indexing records, proofreading transcriptions, or running a helpdesk keeps volunteers in direct contact with archival material, and regularly produces breakthroughs in their own personal research.

Make geography irrelevant. Many capable potential volunteers live nowhere near the physical headquarters. Committee meetings on Zoom, clearly advertised as such, open the field enormously. Roles like journal editor, database manager, or webmaster have no geographic requirement, but many societies still advertise them as though they do.

Asynchronous tasks are equally worth promoting: transcription, indexing, proofreading, work that can be done at midnight in a different time zone or fitted around a full-time job or caring responsibilities. It won’t fill the chair vacancy, but it builds a pool of engaged people from which future officers tend to emerge.

The gap between knowing these and applying them systematically and year-round, rather than just during Volunteers’ Week or in the run-up to the AGM, is where societies often stall.

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This Week’s Online Genealogy Events

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual/

Tuesday, 2 June

2:30 PM: Reflecting on Your Self to Discover Your Ancestors, by Dai Davies for Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.
https://acpl.libnet.info/event/16453136

8:00 PM: Your Family Tree, Everywhere: Mac and iOS Genealogy Solutions, by Linda Yip for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/your-family-tree-everywhere-mac-and-ios-genealogy-solutions/

Wednesday, 3 June

11:30 AM: 10 Ways German Research Is Different from U.S. Research, by Ernest Thode for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/10-ways-german-research-is-different-from-u-s-research/

12:45 PM: German Surnames Unlocked: Meanings, Origins, and Clues, by Andrea Bentschneider for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/german-surnames-unlocked-meanings-origins-and-clues/

2:00 PM: Cracking the Case with German Records You’ve Never Used Before, by Ursula C. Krause for Legacy Family Tree Webinars. https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/cracking-the-case-with-german-records-youve-never-used-before/

7:30 PM: British Home Children in Huron, by Sinead Cox for OGS Huron Branch.
https://huron.ogs.on.ca/events/huron-branch-british-home-children-in-huron-sinead-cox/

Thursday 5 June

1:00 PM: FamilySearch Labs Rapid Fire: 3 New Features, by Sarah Hammon, Kaylee Pence, and Mike Davis for rootstech.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/session/familysearch-labs-rapid-fire-4-new-features

7:00 PM: Scrolling through Norwegian Genealogy Resources Online, by Eleanor Brinsko for OGS.
https://ogs.on.ca/events/june-webinar-scrolling-through-norwegian-genealogy-resources-online-eleanor-brinsko-2

Friday, 5 June

11:00 AM: Essential Skills for New Genealogists 3 of 12: U.S. Census Records from 1790–1950 and Beyond, by Dave McDonald for Legacy Family Tree Webinars.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/essential-skills-for-new-genealogists-3-of-12-u-s-census-records-from-1790-1950-and-beyond/

Saturday, 6 June
10:00 AM: Using the Registry of Deeds in Dublin: in person and online, by David Elliott for OGS London & Middlesex Branch.
https://londonmiddlesex.ogs.on.ca/events/london-and-middlesex-branch-using-the-registry-of-deeds-in-dublin-in-person-and-online/

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Bennett Greenspan on Y-DNA

In a newly posted video, Bennett Greenspan, founder of FamilyTreeDNA, breaks down how modern Y-DNA testing can help genealogists explore the direct paternal line, compare Y-DNA matches, investigate surname lines, and push past genealogy brick walls when traditional records reach their limits.

Using the story of his own family research, Bennett shows how Y-DNA results, STR markers, SNPs, haplogroups, terminal SNPs, and Big Y matching helped him identify paternal-line connections, trace migration patterns, and connect branches of a family tree across centuries, even a millennium and more.

 

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Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found interesting this week.

Find A Grave
On Thursday, Ancestry updated its version of Find A Grave. For Canada, there are now 12,676,127 entries, up from 11,905,737 in December; for the UK and Ireland, 25,876,135 entries (23,818,332).

Ancestry Hampshire Updates
Hampshire, England, Church of England Burials, 1813-1921 now has
622,661 records. Hampshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1536-1812 has 2,974,276 records.

How to Organize 10,000 Photos Without Losing Your Mind
By Alex Cooke, a Cleveland-based photographer and editor-in-chief of Fstoppers, a photography blog. He also happens to be a meteorologist and has posted some interesting weather and climate maps and tools on his personal website. Sadly, they extend only to USA territory.

Beyond the Prompt: Take Your AI To The Next Level
Imagine you could move information in and out of AI tools in different formats to get the most accurate and useful results. Canadian family historian Mark Thompson teaches this in an accessible webinar from RootsTech recorded on 21 May.  The first five minutes of ado is followed by Mark’s 60-minute presentation, then stay for the short Q/A session that follows.

The Niche YouTube Genealogy Leader
“Stop Using Only Ancestry — Try These Free Genealogy Websites Instead!“ attracted 6.8K views in 19 hours. Five free websites, one I hadn’t heard of, that offer immediate, actionable value.

Cancon
Check out what’s new from Canada’s History and the Legion Magazine.

Thanks to the following individuals for their comments and tips:  Anonymous, Bryan, Christine Jackson, Gail, Teresa, and Unknown.

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Findmypast Weekly Update: Manchester

Manchester Rate Books
From 1800 to 2000, the 433,105 records added bring the total to almost five million names of tax payers in the boroughs which now make up Greater Manchester.

These records usually record the following detail:

• Name of Occupier (head of household)
• Name of Owner
• Description of the property (house or business)
• Street Address/Township/Parish
• Rate to be paid (e.g. poor rate, water rate)
• Amount to paid
• Date paid or any default on payment

Every fifth year’s rate books are indexed to coincide with census years for parts of the following boroughs:

• Bolton 1916-1936
• Manchester 1706-1941
• Oldham 1841-1936
• Rochdale 1826-1921
• Stockport 1886-1921
• Tameside 1846-1936
• Trafford 1836-1931
• Wigan 1806-1936

Manchester Faces and Places
Sub-titled”an illustrated record of the social, political, and commercial life of the cotton metropolis and its environs,” the years covered are 1889-1906. Find 5,455 entries.

Greater Manchester Electoral Registers 1820-1940
Each record of the 172,404 added provides a transcription and an original image. Most of the transcriptions will include the following:

Name
Address
Location
Township
Ward
Type of record
Archive and reference
Repository

The original images could contain even more information such as, ‘nature of qualification or nature of the property rated.’ Until 1918, the right to vote was closely linked to property ownership. This detail on the registers is used to clarify whether the person owned a property or paid rent above a specific rate, making them eligible for voting.

Newspapers

New Titles

Title Pages Added Date Range
The Tricyclist 1,218 pages 1884
Rhyl Record & Advertiser 6,472 pages 1855-1869, 1874-1877
Jackson’s Woolwich Journal and Army and Navy Gazette 1,552 pages 1877-1878, 1881-1882, 1885-1887, 1890
Hednesford Advertiser 3,024 pages 1884-1896, 1899
County Herald 7,890 pages 1818-1843, 1858-1860, 1862-1864
Accrington Advertiser 3,574 pages 1889-1896, 1898-1902

Publications with Over 10,000 Pages Added

Title Pages Added Date Range
Trinidad Royal Gazette 26,206 pages 1905-1914
Leatherhead Advertiser 26,372 pages 2000-2001, 2003, 2005
Irvine Herald 19,890 pages 2001-2002, 2005
Horley & Gatwick Mirror 39,972 pages 2000-2005
Gloucester Citizen 23,190 pages 2005
Chester Chronicle (Frodsham & Helsby edition) 40,024 pages 2000-2004
Birmingham Daily Post 48,350 pages 2000, 2003-2004
Billericay Gazette 39,480 pages 2001-2005

 

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WikiTree Sourcer

If you are looking for an easy way to grab source details from records you find on the various genealogy websites, including those featuring newspapers, you might want to try this extension.

That’s a concluding sentence in a post on Writing my Past by BC blogger, historian, and library technician, Teresa. The post is WikiTree Sourcer now cites from FMP newspaper clippings…

If, like me, you’re not a WikiTree user, you likely won’t know about the WikiTree Sourcer Extension. As explained, it “automatically captures the metadata from record pages on a variety of genealogy-related websites, including the Big Four online repositories and other more specialized ones, like Geneteka. The generated citations are based on Evidence Explained, so even if you find a record at a site not supported by the extension, you can use an earlier one as a template.”

Why not try it?

 

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Ancestry adds Suffolk Bishops’ Transcripts

New to Ancestry, Suffolk, England, Bishops’ Transcripts, 1538-2000 has 8,876,507 entries for a long list of parishes. Each is linked to an image of the original.
Contents are hit and miss.
Not all Suffolk parishes are included. For instance, in the northeastern part of the county, Belton, Bradwell, Burgh Castle, Corton, Lowestoft, Lound, and Somerleyton are missing, although Hopton is included. In the west, Barrow is missing.

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AI Consensus Can Safeguard Genealogical Transcription

For family historians, a single misread word can be catastrophic. Faded parish registers and hurriedly scribbled 18th-century wills routinely conceal surnames, locations, and crucial dates beneath layers of age and haste. Misreading “Moor” as “Moon” is all it takes. The result is an incompatible branch grafted silently onto a family tree, and you may not catch it for years. Who hasn’t seen errors perpetuated in online trees?

AI models have made significant strides in transcription accuracy, yet still average a handful of errors per page. These mistakes are rarely wild inventions, more often plausible-looking errors that don’t raise alarms. That’s what makes them so dangerous.

Canadian historian Mark Humphries tackles this problem in his blog post, When Models Disagree…Transcription Accuracy Improves Significantly (subscribe to read). The approach is to pass a document through three distinct AI model families, such as Gemini, Claude, and GPT, then overlay the outputs. Where the models diverge, the system flags a potential error. Each model family has its own architectural blind spots, and disagreement between them is a reliable signal that something deserves a closer look. Cross-model consensus catches roughly three-quarters of all transcription errors. That pushes accuracy close to that of a skilled palaeographer and reduces manual review to only the most problematic passages.

Humphries outlines a fully automated process, but you don’t need that for a single knotty problem. There’s a simpler, poor man’s version. Feed the paragraph, or better yet, the full page to preserve context, through three or more AI models and compare what comes back. If that sounds tedious, hand the comparison itself to an AI. It takes minutes. The discrepancies it surfaces are where your attention should go.

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The Early Perley

On Thursday, 28 May, the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society will host an online presentation of interest to anyone researching Ottawa families, philanthropy, health institutions, or property on Wellington Street in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In “The Perley family and the Perley Health facility,” Glenn Wright will outline the history of the Perley family, including their prominent Wellington Street mansion and its 1897 donation to a group seeking to establish a home for “incurables.” The talk follows the story through to 1920, when a new Perley Health building opened on Aylmer Avenue.

The online session begins at 7:00 p.m.

Registration: https://ottawa.ogs.on.ca/events/the-perley-family-and-the-perley-health-facility-ottawa/

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Intellectual Freedom and Transparency at LAC

Library and Archives Canada has a new statement on intellectual freedom. It commits to making collections “available to all,” to not restricting access based on “a user’s intentions,” and to standing in “opposition to censorship.” Those are strong words. Earlier this year, I put them to a practical test.

In April, I filed an Access to Information request with LAC seeking “documentation on internal or collaborative projects finalized, in development, or under preliminary consideration intended to increase or update online access to LAC holdings for fiscal year 2026–27 and beyond.” In plain terms: what is LAC planning to digitize or make more accessible online, and when?

LAC’s response was a notice of extension: 450 days.

What the Access to Information Act actually allows

To be fair to LAC, the extension is entirely legal. The Access to Information Act permits institutions to extend the 30-day response deadline where a request involves a large volume of records or requires consultations that cannot reasonably be completed within the standard period. LAC is not, on its face, violating the law by invoking this provision.

But legal compliance and alignment with stated institutional values are different questions.

The alignment problem

LAC’s intellectual freedom statement is framed around access. Its own language commits the institution to “making our collections available to all” and “creating space for the exchange of ideas.” It explicitly states that LAC does not restrict access based on a user’s intentions.

The information I requested is not about the collections themselves. It concerns LAC’s own plans, its internal and collaborative roadmap for expanding public access. This is operational information about how a publicly funded institution intends to fulfil its mandate.

“An institution that opposes censorship might reasonably be held to a higher standard of openness about its own plans than the minimum the law requires.”

A 450-day extension on a request of this kind creates an obvious tension. If LAC has concrete plans to improve online access, those plans will be either substantially underway or shelved before any researcher, partner, or interested member of the public can learn what they were. The information, when it eventually arrives, may describe a past rather than inform a future.

The institutional transparency gap

LAC’s intellectual freedom statement is entirely outward-facing. It describes what LAC does for users regarding its holdings. It says nothing about transparency regarding LAC’s own decision-making, planning, or partnerships. That gap is not unusual for a government institution, but it is worth naming, precisely because LAC places intellectual freedom at the centre of its public identity.

Intellectual freedom, as a principle, is not limited to library collections. It includes the right to seek information about public institutions and their intentions. A 450-day response window on questions about publicly funded digitization plans does not obviously serve that principle, whatever its legal standing.

What’s fair to acknowledge

LAC manages an enormous volume of records and operates under real resource constraints. ATIP requests compete with ongoing operations, and large-scale searches through internal project documentation are genuinely time-consuming. The volume of responsive records is likely substantial.

LAC’s intellectual freedom statement acknowledges its legal obligations, including those under the Access to Information Act. Institutional transparency and collection access are treated, in that document, as related but distinct commitments.

The bottom line

Legally permissible extension?   Likely yes
Consistent with LAC’s stated values on access?   Partial, at best
Consistent with intellectual freedom as a principle?   In tension

Practically useful to researchers?   No

An institution that publicly champions intellectual freedom and access has implicitly accepted a higher standard than legal minimum compliance. A 450-day delay on a request about plans to improve public access is not censorship. But it is the kind of institutional opacity that intellectual freedom, properly understood, is meant to push back against.

I’ll report back when the records arrive. Likely sometime in 2027.

Transparency: A first draft of this post’s wording was generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 based on my comprehensive prompts.

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This Week’s Online Genealogy Events

Choose from these selected free online events. All times are Eastern Time, unless otherwise noted. Registration may be required in advance—please check the links to avoid disappointment. For many more events, mainly in the U.S., visit https://conferencekeeper.org/virtual/.

NOTE: The US NGS conference takes place from 27-30 May.

Tuesday, 26 May

02:00 PM: Ottawa Virtual Genealogy Drop-In, for OGS Ottawa Branch. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86956419387

07:00 PM: Beyond the Basics: Exploring the Full Power of FamilySearch.org, by Manny Sanhueza for OGS Wellington County Branch. https://wellington.ogs.on.ca/events/wellington-county-branch-beyond-the-basics-exploring-the-full-power-of-familysearch-org/

Wednesday, 27 May

07:00 PM: ChatGPT for Genealogists, by Robert Cameron Weir for Niagara County Genealogical Society (US).
http://www.NiagaraGenealogy.org/blog/

Thursday, 28 May

07:00 PM: Beginnings: The Early History of Perley Health, 1890-1920, by Glenn Wright for OGS Ottawa Branch. https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Zn0F2PauTW-fd7ZfRVjLdw

Friday, 29 May
Saturday, 30 May