Gloucestershire

Introduction 

Welcome to the  general starting point for the help and guidance on GENUKI. You will also find links throughout GENUKI to help topics particularly relevant to what you are looking at or doing.

Using Help and Guidance

You can dip in and out. There will shortly be  a contents page and an index rather like a book. You can search using our general search facility.There will be links at the bottom of each page to get you back to various starting points.

Updated

The guidance has been extensively reviewed during summer 2020 following the upgrade to Drupal 8. Each page  is marked with either:  a yellow/amber flash if it may still be require minor correction but is usable; or green flash if it is finalised. Even if the page is finalised please  let us know of any issues or oddities you spot by clicking on the blue bar at the bottom of that page.

Pages that are now redundant should be located in the Archive and are marked with a red flash.

GENUKI: An Overview

Here are the key points to help you  get the best out of GENUKI:

• GENUKI covers GENealogical information for the United Kingdom and Ireland: Hence the name GEN - UK - I.
• The information is organised by geography and topic. The geography uses the historic counties and ancient parishes and the topics are based on a well established system for genealogists.
• It is a "virtual reference library". In practice that means it is both an index and a library. Most of the entries in the county and parish pages are the index, showing you where to find information, much of which is found on other places on the internet (we usually link directly to those) but also printed and other material that you will find in physical libraries and archives.  A significant part of the information has been created by volunteers and is made available directly through GENUKI as part of our internal library. We have clear standards for our indexing and transcription.
• The virtual reference library is supported by two specialised databases: Churches and a Gazetteer. These are also useful tools in their own right.
• Maps are used both to help navigation and, in much more detail, to help investigate connections in localities.
• It is free and delivered by a team of volunteers who collate the information and manage the presentation and the system.

 Each of these aspects is explained in more detail in the  Background on GENUKI's approach.

What GENUKI does not do

We are sorry but we cannot answer queries about any searches for genealogical information about individuals either within GENUKI or more generally. We do not have the volunteer capacity to do so. But if you use our search facilitiesyou should be able to check whether any name does appear in any of the documents within GENUKI.

Feedback and Engagement

We welcome feedback and engagement from all visitors to GENUKI. You can:

• help us improve the content by clicking on the blue button on any page to report errors or offer new information;
• join in the tasks of maintaining, improving and expanding GENUKI. You can see more about the roles involved in volunteering in the  Who does What section ;
• contact us to raise any problems with GENUKI  such as copyright etc

Help for all Users

Help and Guidance is tailored around the needs of different users: visitors and volunteers/maintainers.

Visitors

• Help for  visitors focuses on navigating the site, explaining what you can expect to find and where, and making good use of that information. There is:
  • help on getting started quickly navigating around the site to find information;
  • fuller  help for visitors to understand more about what is available;
  • guidance on getting started in genealogy

Volunteers and Maintainers

• Guidance for the volunteers  who maintain GENUKI focuses on adding information to the site, ensuring the consistency of presentation, developing new approaches and  underpinning the operation of the system. There is :
  • overall guidance for maintainers covering the main issues;
  • general advice on maintaining the site and developing the content;
  • more detailed technical guidance on the tasks and tools.

None of this is private to either group so visitors may sometimes find it helpful to look at more detailed information for  maintainers. Certainly do so if you are interested in helping with GENUKI to get a flavour of what is required.

GENUKI Organisation

GENUKI is a non-commercial service, provided by a group of volunteers in cooperation with a number of family history societies. It  is a charitable trust with a Trust Deed. There is a board of Trustees and an Executive Teamresponsible for day-to-day operations. There is a formal statement of the  roles of the Trustees and the Executive team. Other aspects of how we work are explained here.

GENUKI's History and development

GENUKI was conceived and implemented in 1995  in the very early stages of the world wide web becoming available. It has grown enormously in content since then and has taken advantage of a number of advances in web software. The background and purpose is more fully explained in this section with  articles from 1995 on the origins,  progress reports, later articles and information about the change to using Drupal in 2015 and the upgrade in 2020.

GENUKI in the Future

Genuki is always under  development. There are some pointers to our current approach to future developments.

GENUKI Reference Documents

For convenience we have brought together  key documents on organisation and process including legal requirements here. The documents are also linked from appropriate places through out the guide.

GENUKI Archive

Recently GENUKI has been through two significant technical transitions: in 2015 from the individually prepared webpages to the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) and in 2020 from version 7 of Drupal to version 8. A further upgrade to Drupal 9 took place in early 2021 but with less significance for the apparent operation of the site.

We have archived much ol the previous guidance. Some of it may be retained as having historic interest, some is still of current interest, some is due eventually to be deleted. You will find these items, temporarily at least, on the  Archive page