FamilySearch WikiProject: Royal Asiatic Society Journals Project

Project Description
Some journals of the Royal Asiatic Society are available digitally and contain information about countries colonized by Great Britain. Sometimes these journals contain transcriptions of old cemeteries, listings of burials, city maps, and other genealogically relevant information. The purpose of this project is to skim through the journals and then in a spreadsheet record the country, type of record, and the URL link for the page in the journal where the information is found. Once this is done, the information will be added to the appropriate Wiki pages in another project. We don't know how many helpful articles we'll find, so please don't be discouraged if you don't find many articles.

Step 1

 * Go to a task list, pick a decade (they are separated as different tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet), and type your name in the year you're going to do. There were/are several different branches of the society, and different spread sheets have been created for each of them.
 * Great Britain and Ireland task list - Active
 * Ceylon Branch task list - Active
 * Straits Branch task list - Active
 * China/North China Branch task list - Active
 * Bengal Branch task list - Active
 * Bombay Branch task list - Active
 * Korea Branch task list - Active
 * Malayan Branch task list - Active



Searchbar

 * Open up Archive.org in a new tab, and type in "Royal Asiatic BRANCH NAME YEAR". Make sure and type in the SEARCH bar further down on the middle of the page and not in the WayBackMachine search engine near the top.



Search Results

 * Often more than one copy of the same volume will show up in the search results. It is only necessary to check one.
 * Sometimes you will need to click on more than one search result to find the correct volume. When opening up a search result, don't just look at the publication date that has been transcribed at the bottom with the information of the volume, this is often incorrect, look at the first few pages of the journal to see what year it says.

Checking the Journals

 * Once you have located the correct year of the journal in the search results, open it, and then browse the index or look through the journal to see if there are articles that could be of genealogical importance (most of these will probably be cemetery transcriptions or listings of graves, but there are also sometimes city maps or obituaries).
 * You don't need to read through each page, there are often 500+ pages. If you choose to look at the index rather than browse the pages, please make sure that the index is for all 500+ pages (if it's a large one). The journals were quarterly and one volume might contain more than one issue bound in one, and sometimes the index for the first one will be at the front of the book and the other indexes later on.

Add to the Spreadsheet

 * If you find an article that has information that could be of genealogical value, paste the URL and type the page number into the spreadsheet. Here's an example. The "Type of record" is what type of information is in the article. If you find more than one article that should be listed, just add an extra line under the previous one and enter in the appropriate information. If you do not know how to add another line, please put the information in the extra columns to the right.
 * If no article is found that would be important to link to on the Wiki, then type "NONE" in the "Type of Article" column, and then move on.

Example
Here's an example of what some of the genealogically important articles could look like. Graves of Europeans at Isfahan, 1919, Fort Canning Cemetery, 1912.