Kentucky Biographies Project History
The Kentucky Biographies Project began in the mid-1990s as an effort to bring printed Kentucky county and state histories onto the internet in searchable form. Early volunteers focused on transcribing biographical sketches from nineteenth and early twentieth century books and making them freely available to researchers.
Origins and Early Scope
A project FAQ from 1996 described a very specific scope. Volunteers were to work only with Kentucky biographies, not wills, census schedules, cemetery lists, or other record types. The plan was to key the major biography collections such as Kentucky: A History of the State by Battle, Perrin, and Kniffin, along with other public domain volumes, and to provide a search engine for individual names. The FAQ also encouraged biographies of Kentuckians who migrated to other states.
How the Project Worked
The project operated by email and plain text files. Volunteers acquired their own books, typed the biographies, and submitted the files for checking and archiving. A set of data entry standards guided the work, including a fixed line length of seventy-five characters, preservation of original spelling and punctuation, and a standard way to list sources, surnames, and locations at the end of each entry.
An internal outline also described a related “Living Biographies Project,” which invited people to submit contemporary biographical information in a structured format. This was intended to capture modern family histories, not just historical sketches.
Volunteers and Source Books
By the late 1990s, volunteers across Kentucky and beyond were working from a wide range of standard reference works. A surviving list from 1998 shows transcribers and the books they covered, including multi-volume sets such as Kentucky: A History of the State, Biographical Cyclopedia of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, History of Kentucky by Lewis Collins, and many county and regional histories.
Another document tracks which volunteer keyed which county from the Kentucky: A History of the State series and its McDowell reprint. This list shows how the work was divided and how thoroughly the original vision was pursued across the state.
Editing and Training
An update from January 1997 explains that editors reviewed biographies for typing errors and layout issues, even though they often did not have the original books in front of them. The same note emphasizes that scanners did not reliably capture text at the time, so volunteers were expected to type from their own copies and then pass the work through an editor and archivist.
From Active Project to Reference Collection
The active volunteer structure that supported the Kentucky Biographies Project in the 1990s has long since ended. However, the biographies created during those years remain an important part of KYGenWeb. They preserve details that are often missing from courthouse records, such as family relationships, occupations, church ties, and migration paths.
Today the Kentucky Biographies files are maintained as a static reference collection within KYGenWeb. While the original project roles, training procedures, and mailing lists are historical, the work of those early volunteers continues to benefit researchers who are tracing Kentucky families.