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Update on the project
Transcribing petitionsWe are continuing to upload more Petition letters, and thanks to you over 60% of the ‘Petitions Admitted’ group have been transcribed! We will aim to upload bundles as soon as the previous ones are done, however there may be a delay if they finish over the weekends, so please be patient with us! The Petitions Admitted set of Petition Letters cover the period 1763 – 1881. In total, there are ninety bundles of these letters. From 1763 mothers had to ‘petition’ by writing a letter to the Foundling Hospital to request their child to be taken in. You can find out more about the petition letters and the system for admitting children to the Foundling Hospital over the years here and here. In 2021 we transcribed a different series of Petition Letters in the archive (titled Petitions admitted to ballot, admitted and rejected). We transcribed an amazing 25 volumes of these letters, thanks to the brilliant work of transcribers!
Preparing the records to go online: cataloguing and data cleaning We have started to ‘data clean’ the petition letter transcriptions generated on Zooniverse in preparation for the new online catalogue, which will host all of our digitised records and allow people to search the digitised archive.The data cleaning process involves largely correcting punctuation, as well as removing duplications created by the transcription algorithm. We want to thank everyone transcribing on Zooniverse for all their hard work transcribing these documents and for persevering with some of the more challenging handwriting that has come up!
– Molly and Beck, VTT Team
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