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This talk introduces the project ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790’, which is a collaboration between the UK National Archives and the University of Exeter (UK).
The project team is transcribing, indexing, and analysing the contents of a very large sample of 25,000 English wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.
The project explores a key question: how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation? While the project is focused on the content of bequests, they will be making the transcriptions available open access, and hope this will be a valuable resource for genealogists and others interested in wills as a source for family or local history.
This talk will also introduce the ‘crowdsourcing’ or ‘citizen science’ element of the project. They are appealing for a large number of volunteers to help check automatically-generated transcriptions on a Zooniverse site.
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