Founded in 1911, the Society of Genealogists is a charity with a unique purpose – to help people discover their place in history. We preserve the records of everyday lives and make them available to anyone wanting to understand where they’ve come from – grassroots sources, rich data of unlikely origin, exceptional assets that capture the unfolding, unofficial history of us all.

Created by society members in the first half of the 20th century, the Great Card Index is made up of over a million handwritten cards. Each containing various items of genealogical information extracted from sources such as parish registers, marriage licenses, will indexes, monumental inscriptions and unique items in the Society’s collections. The cards have been digitised and volunteers extract information from them to make them digitally searchable. This project will make this resource available and searchable online for the first time since its inception over a century ago.

We’re now up to surnames beginning with H and we’re delighted to see card images and index entries for surnames A to C added to our collections system, SoG Explore.

We’re currently looking for volunteers who would like to work from home or on-site. If you’ve used spreadsheets and or Dropbox before that would be an advantage (but don’t worry if you haven’t, we can teach you!)

It's an indexing project with a twist and volunteers working on it tell us that this project is better than sudoku for keeping the mind sharp!