Leading genealogy charity, Free UK Genealogy has announced two new features for family historians that will make returning to records a great deal easier.
At THE Genealogy Show in Birmingham today, Pat Reynolds (Executive Director of Free UK Genealogy) announced the addition of two new features on their websites.
FreeCEN (with free access to high quality transcriptions of nineteenth century British censuses) and FreeREG (with high quality transcriptions of registrations of baptism, marriage and burials) now have "friendly" permanent URLs to their records.
Pat said, “This feature will enable you to copy the URL from the browser bar, and paste it into a list of useful URLs - there is just enough information in the URL to help you see who the person you searched for is, when you come back to your work after a break”.
The second new feature makes use of permanent URLs: if you want to cite a FreeCEN or FreeREG transcription in your family tree/academic work or take a note of a record of interest to return to it later, now you can do so using the Citation Generator button. This is located on the far right of the row of buttons after "Next Dwelling" and "New Search" on FreeCEN, and next to the "Export as JSON" button on FreeREG. Clicking there, you get a choice of which format of citation you want to use. As the generator uses the permanent URLs, it means you will always be able to go back to the record without having to search for it again.
These new features have been brought to you by our team of volunteer developers, and in the case of the citation generator, by Sudaraka Jayathilaka who developed this feature as an intern working with us as part of the Google Summer of Code programme. Google Summer of Code is a global programme that brings student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organisation on a 3 month programming project during their break from college or university. Sudaraka has written about his experience on his Medium blog. https://medium.com/@sudarakayasindu/how-i-spent-my-summer-with-gsoc-2018-as-an-intern-of-free-uk-genealogy-245f7871a886
Free UK Genealogy is actively recruiting coders with experience in Ruby on Rails and/or Mongo DB, or wanting to learn these as additional skills. Further information can be found at https://www.freeukgenealogy.org.uk/about/volunteer/tech-volunteering-opportunities/.
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Free UK Genealogy is also delighted to announce that they have been awarded a grant by the Pelagios Commons which will enable Richard Light, Chair of the charity, to work of the University of Portsmouth in mapping the geopolitical units of Britain - its counties, registration districts, parishes and so on - which vary across time so that they are available as linked data. This will enable the units, which are currently available on visionofbritain.org to be used more widely and more accurately by genealogists and other historians of all kinds.
