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PRACTICAL ASSISTANCE FOR RECORD OFFICES

1. The record office staff would welcome additional volunteers to help in making up individual phase boxes of Parish registers.  Volunteers need to have a reasonable hand strength and dexterity for this task.  Please contact Brenda Dreghorn on 01228 227281 or Hazel Gatford on 01229 407377 if you are interested in helping.

1. The practical assitance required at Carlisle is help with preservation packaging of the records ready for the move in 2010.They have a closely supervised team programme which is fully manned at this time  but have a volunteer's desk set aside in the back workroom where (with a little warning, please), they require one person to undertake preservation wrapping with low-level supervision.

Carlisle [Conservation Unit] :

1.  At Ashley Street, Carlisle , they  could use individual volunteers, for a regular 2 hour (or more), fortnightly or weekly session, for various tasks to do with preparation for our ongoing conservation and preservation jobs. Suitable times for them would be between the hours of 9.30 - 4pm on Mondays - Wednesdays at present. Much of this preparation work is to do with organising/cleaning/copying, it is repetative and wouldn't provide the opportunity to read the documents I'm afraid but it would be very helpful to them!).

Anybody interested in this projects should  contact Brenda Dreghorn on 01228 607281, referring to this website.

1. TO BE ADVISED

Whitehaven:

1. Cumberland Pacquet index : Volunteers are sought for the ongoing project to help enter the Cumberland Pacquet newspaper card entries into a computer database. No particular IT skills are needed as staff are happy to show anyone interested how to enter the basic details from the index cards onto a computer. Although we would like volunteers to confirm the timing of their visit in advance, we also are not asking for a significant or unending commitment of time – why not volunteer to enter simply the surname from your family? Or if you’d prefer we are happy for you to volunteer for the same 1 hour/ part day at the same time each week.

Originally compiled in the mid 1980s by workers on a job creation scheme the original card index is an invaluable tool for family and local historians as the original indexers referenced many fascinating snippets from by-gone editions, including all birth, marriage and death announcements from the paper’s start in 1774 until about 1855. Although volunteers will not be reading the full entries in the papers (as the work just involves the index entries) this is such a valuable task as the original cards are presently stored in wooden card index drawers and there is no other place for these but on the floor, which makes accessing the drawers’ contents difficult and leaves many potential researchers ‘floored’!


If you are interested in helping with any of the above, then contact the Senior Archivist at the relevant Record Office, referring to this page on the FOCAS website

This page was last modified on Monday, December 29, 2008 01:05:29 AM