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Help and Guidance

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Introduction 


Welcome to GENUKI, a  virtual reference library of genealogical information relevant to the British Isles, i.e. Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland), Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.  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,  on the internet (we usually link directly to those) or in physical libraries and archives. We also hold directly a library of information - transcriptions etc - provided by volunteers.

This page is 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 is a simplified  contents page. You can search using our general search facility.There will be links at the bottom of each page to get you back to the  various starting points.

The guidance was extensively rewritten following the upgrade to Drupal 8 in 2020 and now takes account of the further upgrades to Drupal 9 in 2021 and  Drupal 10  in October 2023. Some minor corrections are being made.

There is more background on the revision process and the progress here.

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 sets of information: 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 facilities you 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

Volunteers and Maintainers

None of this guidance 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. However maintainers will need to login to see some of the internal functions (eg lists of the items for which they are responsible) and to edit content.

 

GENUKI Organisation


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

The costs of GENUKI  are met by donations, mainly from individuals. You can contribute to the work  by making a donation.

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, the major upgrade in 2020 and further upgrades in 2021 and 2023.

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 Help and Guidance 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 and to Drupal 10 in 2023  but with less significance for the apparent operation of the site.

We have removed almost all the previous guidance or modified it heavily into the new structure. Some pages where there is historic material (articles about GENUKI etc) are included in this guidance.