Voices Through Time Transcription Project

Welcome to our first newsletter

We are really pleased to have you with us on the project.

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Have you received our welcome email? Signed up on Zooniverse? See our welcome information below.

Key information

Welcome information

Queries: Write your question in Talk
Our team is part-time.
We will always get back to your question as soon as we can.

All about the project

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Foundling Hospital pupils at a summer camp. Reasonable efforts have been made to determine where copyright is held by third parties and obtain the relevant consent of copyright owners where applicable. Any queries relating to copyright in this content should be referred to marketing@coram.org.uk

This month

225 people transcribing
282 record pages completed
658 Talk comments
3,599 pages transcribed

Each page is completed once it has been transcribed three separate times. It's then compiled together into a final transcription, to ensure best quality.

We are blown away by your transcribing...

We are racing through the records at a fantastic pace.

This month we have completed Volumes 1, 2 and 3 of the Foundling Hospital’s General Registers!

We are now at 40% completion of Volume 4 of the General Registers.

Volume 5 is the last volume of the General Registers.
You can read more about the General Registers in the Field Guide. This is the tab on the right-hand side of the webpage, when you are transcribing.

Update from our Archivist

Thanks so much to everyone that has helped us transcribe our General Register records so far. Over the course of the next couple of years, there will be a total of just under 112,000 records to transcribe. We've started with the General Registers here, next up will be some Baptism Registers, Nursery Books and Inspection Books. Through these, we hope you will help us uncover and piece together previously unknown information and stories.

These records are a real treasure trove, and any time you can spend transcribing, and even carrying out further research, will contribute to both this project and the broader collection of knowledge that currently exists about the Foundling Hospital and the story of the care system.

These records have been digitised by staff at London Metropolitan Archives.
A blog about the digitisation process and what this involves will be available over the next couple of months. In the meantime, you can find out about some of the Conservation work that has been carried out on the archives prior to them being digitised here

Over the course of this project, we'll keep you updated on our progress and will share the stories of individuals involved in the Foundling Hospital that continue to come to light. We hope you will stay with us on this journey into the Archive!

Jo Blyghton, Voices Through Time Project Archivist

Talks and events

Join us for talks and events online. You can always attend for free as a volunteer.

See here for the latest events.

Coming up

Public attitudes to care – past, present and future
Thomas Coram Life and Legacy

Monthly challenge coming soon

We are going to be posting a challenge for you to get stuck in to each month. It might be a special task, or a name we are looking for in the records. Watch this space!

Copy of an engraving of 1749 showing a queue of women with babies outside the gates of the Foundling Hospital in Camden, London

More about the Foundling Hospital

Getting interested in the history? Have a look at these.

Interesting stories about the Foundling Hospital
Talks from the Foundling Museum

Ellen discovers her great grandfather

I was so excited to see that he had been found amongst the records.
Seeing his name written with all the other children's made his time in the Foundling Hospital even more real for me.
- Ellen

We have some wonderful news. Volunteer Ellen’s great grandfather was discovered in the records!

After finding out that her ancestor, Malachi Pitt was a Foundling, Ellen put a call out on the Talk message board to see if anyone could find him in the records. And amazingly volunteer @mobow discovered him in the General Registers!

Malachi was recorded as received on 4th Nov 1757 and sent to be nursed on the same day.

A swatch of a fabric token left by a mother at the Foundling Hospital. Small objects or tokens were left with children by their mothers as a means of identification, in the hope that they would be in a position to be reunited later on.

Completed transcriptions, what do they look like?

We know when you are transcribing there is a missing piece of the process - seeing what your transcriptions look like when they are completed!

So we thought we’d give you a peek! Here is a piece of a completed transcription.

Transcriptions are exported from Zooniverse, then compiled together using a programming script that turns them into files (in a csv format).

Thank you

It's great to have you with us on the project. Thank you for all your hard work.

Let's keep discovering the story of care together. #RealStoriesOfCare

Molly, Jo and the Voices Through Time team

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