Many local libraries and historical societies have manuscript collections and records of genealogical value that remain untapped because their content is inaccessible. I volunteer in the archives of the Plymouth (MI) Historical Society Museum and am frequently frustrated with the volume of data within its collection that is hidden to the average researcher.

About two years ago I took on the challenge of transcribing data to make the information more accessible. I donated a copy of Clooz to the Museum and began working on the Schrader Funeral Home records; the copies we have run from 1907-29. Shortly after I began working on these records, the City of Plymouth sent the city's original birth and death records over to the Museum for safekeeping. These records begin in 1904. Having the death records alongside the funeral home records has helped tremendously in transcribing, as many of the same names appear in both records, but the city's records are in better handwriting. As anyone who has transcribed records can attest, this whole process is very tedious and time-consuming, but I'm making progress, working currently in 1916.

When I began the transcriptions, I used the "Documents" template, in Clooz. Another volunteer had already indexed the funeral home records, so I was able to import a list of names into the database. Unfortunately, many of the names were misread so I've had to carefully check each entry before linking it to a document. I created a separate document for each year of the funeral home records and then linked the people buried in that year to the respective document. Then I transcribed the details for each person within the records into that person's detail screen.

After working with funeral and death records for a while, I became frustrated that I didn't have enough fields in the document detail screen for all of the information contained in the records. Since I was already working on an upgrade for Clooz, I created two new templates to specifically handle death and funeral/burial records. The detail screen for the death template contains fields that correspond to many of the death records that I have seen; the detail screen for the funeral/burial template corresponds to what is available in the Schrader Funeral Home records. These templates are included in the Clooz version 1.23 upgrade that will be available within the next few weeks as a free download for current users.

The Plymouth Museum recently doubled in size and will reopen to the public next week. As a result of this expansion, the archive now has its own space and sits adjacent to a research room. We've never had space for researchers before! The research room will eventually have one or two computers that researchers can use to check the archives catalog. But, more importantly to genealogists, the ever-growing database of Plymouth residents and their life events will be available to researchers on these computers. My ideas are bigger than the time I have to devote to this project, but I would love to ultimately see all of the records in the collection entered into Clooz. Thankfully, Plymouth isn't a large city so this goal is potentially attainable in my lifetime.

Additionally, I donated several copies of Legacy Family Tree to the Museum for the computers in the research room. Another lofty goal is to enter all of the people found and their genealogical relationships. Researchers could also submit data, although the primary database would be protected so data isn't entered without being verified.

Potentially, some of the transcribed material could be posted on the Museum's Web site so the information is even more accessible to those at a distance with Plymouth roots. Finding more volunteers to help with data entry is a primary objective, but I haven't achieved any success at that so far. If you're a volunteer at a library or historical society, you might consider taking similar steps to make your repository's holdings more accessible to researchers.

If you're already involved in such a project and have used other methods to make the data searchable, let me know. Or, if you're a librarian and have a wish list for volunteers to work on, send that along. If I get enough input, I'll share the responses with the readers of this column. Now if only some of the data I'm transcribing is related to my research needs

Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing, editor of the Board for Certification of Genealogists' newsletter OnBoard, the creator of Clooz-the electronic filing cabinet for genealogical records, co-creator of the new family health history program GeneWeaver, and a frequent contributor to Ancestry. She can be reached via e-mail at gceditor@ancestry.com.