A new online project – GB1900 – is calling for volunteers across Great Britain to help make sure local place-names can live on rather than be lost for ever.
GB1900 aims to create a complete list of the estimated three million place-names on early Ordnance Survey maps of Britain. It will be a free, public resource, of particular use to local historians and genealogists.
On their new GB1900 web site, www.gb1900.org, volunteers will work on digital images of all the 2nd Edition Ordnance Survey County Series maps of the whole of Great Britain, at six inch to one mile scale. The site’s software enables contributors to mark each name by clicking next to it, and then to type in the name itself. They can also add any personal memories they have of the place. To ensure correctness each name needs to be identically transcribed by two different volunteers.
The final list of place names will be the world’s largest ever historical gazetteer.
It will be released under a Creative Commons licence, making it usable by everyone without charge.