TONI Coordinators Needed

TONI (The Ontario Name Index) is approaching the 2 million name mark and we have uploaded at least 100,000 entries per each of the last few months. The conversion of files from the Ontario Cemetery Ancestor Index (OCAI) has progressed well and is over 60% complete. Approximately 60,000 items are available through Pay-Per-View (PPV).

Although most of TONI is from cemetery transcripts (both OCAI and new indexes) there are over 200 000 non-cemetery items. By their nature these come in gradually so most of the following have additions every month: vital statistics from Arnprior and McNabb Township, family histories from the provincial library and from Ottawa Branch library, Millbrook newspapers (and soon Weston newspapers), obituaries from London, local histories from several historical societies, and so forth.

A fascinating collection of early documents from Eastern District (now the United County of Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry) will start appearing soon. The documents, owned by the County, will be indexed in TONI and scans made available in PPV. There are hundreds of documents, ranging in date from 1815 to the late 1840s. They will go up slowly because volunteers have to read each hand-written document and extract names, often from signatures. We probably can do between one and two hundred documents each month.

This is great news for Ontario researchers but, in order to keep this up, we need to increase the volunteers on the TONI team. Most of the coordination is now done by one person but we really need to get some more volunteers involved in the management of TONI. We are looking for some keen members who will take on one of these tasks:

1. TONI Volunteer Coordinator
   recruits volunteers, provides basic training, assigns volunteers to projects and monitors their performance (with the Project Coordinators)
2. Project Coordinators
   receives volunteers from the Volunteer Coordinator, trains them in any specific project requirements, prepares material for volunteers (may involve cutting and pasting pdf files), fields questions from volunteers, checks material received from volunteers, adds any fields needed for TONI or PPV, collates the material and passes it on at regular intervals to the TONI Input Desk.

The second task is very similar to the duties of the current Branch/SIG TONI Coordinators but focused on one of the specific projects listed below, or in the future.

The current projects needing a Coordinator are:

• London/Middlesex - London Obits
• Stormont Dundas & Glengarry HS - Family Files
• Arnprior & McNabb-Braeside Archives - Bylaws, Collector's Rolls, Assessment Rolls
• United Counties of SDG - Eastern District early documents
• Weston HS - Newspapers

If you'd like to get involved as the coordinator of any of these (or as a volunteers), please contact Mike More, TONI Provincial Coordinator toni@ogs.on.ca