England Project Orphan Trail Part Two

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England Project | England Orphaned Profiles Team | England Orphan Trail Part Two

Welcome to the Orphan Trail Two

Welcome back to the Orphan Trail.

The Orphan Trail Two (OT2) covers English profiles for the period 1500-1699. It is divided into two stages: 1600-1699 (stage 1) and 1500-1599 (stage 2). You will usually be asked to improve one or two English Orphan profiles for each time period.

As before, you will be assigned a Trailblazer to help you on your journey. This may be the same Trailblazer you worked with in OT1, or may be a different Trailblazer. Trailblazers are busy people and there is a lot of demand for their help so we ask you to make the orphan trail your priority for the short time that it should take you to complete it. It is still important to contact your Trailblazer regularly and keep them updated with your progress. OT2 has quite a long waiting list so it's important not to hold up other Trailers who are keen to get started. In the absence of any such contact, you may find that your Trailblazer has taken another Trailer and you may have to wait to continue.

You will learn:

• To use wildcard/soundex searches to identify records with variant spellings
• To identify conflicting/ambiguous information and document the conflict accurately
• To utilise records beyond the parish register (eg Discovery, WAALT, Internet Archive, HathiTrust)
• To cite a reliable source for every fact in the bio. This iIncludes the 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where and Wherein) in every source/reference
• To write a bio with all the main details discovered about the person
• To use double-dating for pre-1752 events between 1 January and 24 March.
• To add categories
• To add images with appropriate permission statements
• To use Research Notes
• To create hyperlinks within text
• To use Headings and Sub-headings
• To add commonly-used stickers and templates
• To correctly use the appropriate fields for variant and alternate names

You will start to develop skills in:

• Reading old handwriting
• Transcribing records (eg wills)
• Making extracts/abstracts from records (eg summarise the contents of a will)
• Critically analysing content of derivative (secondary) sources
• Understanding the basics of the social, political and religious context of the time
• Enhancing the biography with interesting contextual information and/or images (eg brief discussion of an unusual occupation, image of the church where someone married)
• Use of appropriate qualifiers where something is unproven, but can reasonably be inferred from another fact (eg inferring a birth place from a baptism place: "John was likely born in the parish of Alvingham in Lincolnshire, which is where he was baptised on 23 June 1593".)
• Creating a layered citation (eg for a book which has been digitised)
• Constructing a simple argument recommending how conflicting/ambiguous information should be resolved
• Adding images inline with the biography
• The use free-space-profiles
• The use markup for superscript text, line breaks etc
• The use of Uncertain status indicators

You will be made aware of:

• "Advanced sources" such as manorial records, deeds, poor law records, IPMs
• The Genealogical Proof Standard
• How to access resources to help with Latin for genealogy
• How to access resources that are not available online (eg FamilySearch Centres, County Archives)
• Rigorous use of the "Evidence Explained" citation style.
• G2G forum
• How new categories are created
• Wikitree apps such as Sourcer/WBE

If you do not continue working on your OT2 profiles and fail to keep in touch with your trailblazer you will be paused and should you wish to return to the trail at at later date you will be added to the bottom of the waiting list again, and will have to wait until a trailblazer is available to help you to continue.

1500-1699 Resources Page