Sunday 2 February 2020

Transcription Tuesday: Stobs Military Camp WW1 project

One of the projects selected for this year's Transcription Tuesday event is a Scottish based effort to try to find the names of those interned at Stobs Military Camp during the First World War.

Hannah Bell has shared the following about the project with Who Do You Think You Are? magazine at http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/transcription-tuesday-2020-stobs-camp-prisoner-records. In her account she describes the projhect as follows:

When the First World War broke out in 1914, German and Austrian civilians living in Britain were seen as ‘the enemy within’.

Many were interned in detention camps, either because they were considered a threat to national security or to protect them from hostile citizens.

Foreign nationals were interned at Stobs from the start of the war.

Over the next four years, they were joined by captured soldiers and sailors, and eventually it became a prisoner of war camp.

Records from 1916 list 4,616 prisoners, of whom 1,829 were soldiers, 504 sailors and 2,283 civilians.

Of the civilians, 2,098 were Germans, 181 Austrians, 3 Turks and 1 Bulgarian.

After years of research, we have finally been presented with the opportunity of learning the names of the German prisoners at Stobs both civilian and military.


I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of this project; my own project The Ruhleben Story (http://ruhleben.tripod.com), is something of a mirror image of it, in tracing civilian Scottish, British and former British Empire based citizens in a German POW camp, erected for similar reasons.

For further information on how to take part in the transcription effort on Tuesday 4th February, please visit http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/blog/transcription-tuesday-2020-stobs-camp-project. For more on the Stobs Military Camp visit http://www.stobscamp.org.


There will be three other projects available on Transcription Tuesday also:

FamilySearch: Parish Registers
Discover the lives of people who were baptised, married and buried outside the Church of England by transcribing nonconformist records from Essex, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Northumberland and Norfolk.

Ancestry: West Midlands Police Records
Transcribe detailed records of police officers who served across the West Midlands from the 1860s to the 1940s for Ancestry's free World Archives Project.

Royal Navy First World War Lives at Sea
Help create a database of First World War Royal Navy records with this partnership between The National Archives and the National Maritime Museum.

For further details visit http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/transcriptiontuesday

Chris

You can pre-order my new book, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scottish2 (out April). Also available, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed) at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Irish1 and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records at http://bit.ly/ChrisPaton-Scotland1. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

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