FamilySearch WikiProject: Royal Asiatic Society Journals Project

Project Description
Some of the old Royal Asiatic Society journals are available digitally and contain information about countries in Asia that were colonized by Great Britain. Sometimes these journals will contain transcriptions of old cemeteries or other genealogically relevant information that can be hard to find elsewhere. The purpose of this project is to skim through the journals and then in a spreadsheet record the country, the 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 that many articles. If you have any questions about the project please message Janae at janae.brown@familysearch.org.

Step 1

 * Go to the 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.

Searchbar

 * Open up Archive.org in a new tab, and type in "Royal Asiatic Society 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

 * There were a few different branches of the Royal Asiatic Society. As can be seen in the image to the right, there are journals for the Ceylon Branch, Great Britain and Ireland, and North-China. Each of these has the year "1919" visible in the search result title, some may not though, so it might be necessary to click on the result and then turn the pages to see the year. Sometimes more than one copy of the same magazine was digitized. It is only necessary to look at one of them.

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, although there sometimes are lists of 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 have all four for a year 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 move on.
 * When you have finished looking through a journal then move on to the next year!

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.