Operation War Diaries

[Carla]

These WW1 diaries are being digitalised and released to the public on line today. The National Archives , The Imperial War Museum and the on line research website Zooniverse are launching Operation War Diaries, which is a project aiming to encourage volunteers to uncover details within the diaries. These volunteers are given a segment of the War Diaries are asked to tag key details such as names, places and events. That information will be used in catalogue descriptions and the hope is that it will make it easier for people to trace their ancestors.......The link is to the site where you can help to transcribe the diaries..........

Events from the outbreak of war in 1914 to the departure of troops from Flanders and France were recorded in official diaries of each military unit and about 1.5 million diary pages are held by the National Archives. A fifth have been digitised so far.The project is part of the government's World War One centenary programme.Each unit in World War One was required to keep a diary of its day-to-day activities and the first batch of 1,944 digitised diaries detail the experiences of three cavalry and seven infantry divisions in the initial wave of British army troops deployed in 1914.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

I've signed up for this project it's an interesting way to pass the time. Basically you get a page from a war diary you mark the dates mentioned on it with a line. Then tag anywhere on the page a place or a person is mentioned. You also can tag times and operations - eg: resting, advancing, digging trenches etc. On my first page I had a casualty early in 1914 one guy fell off the gangway as he was getting of a boat landing in France and broke his leg.

Once you have tagged a page you simply click save, and it is added to their indexes. As a crowd sourced project they will show the same page to multiple people so as to get an average coverage for everything on the page. Pages where a few people mark the same content will then be considered compete. The point about several people doing the same page is that it means you don't have to worry about missing something or making mistakes as it is likely others will pickup the differences. This is the beauty of crowd sourcing projects they can divide and conquer an otherwise impossibly large task by getting interested volunteers to assist. They have already indexed several thousand pages but could always do with more volunteers.

When you go to the website there is a short tutorial where you can try out how it works on a sample page. Once you are happy you can register and you will get real pages to do. Its interesting and absorbing and is a very good way of helping add to the sum knowledge of any ancestors who participated in the war.

Note the results will be incorporated into the Lives of the First World War Project which aims to have a page for all 8 million UK and commonwealth participants. By having the actual movements of where regiments were linked to maps and actual pages from diaries and knowing who was in what regiment at what time, these projects will bring that together. Wouldn't it be wonderful to track the lives of your ancestor in this way? Volunteer today to help make this goal a reality.