About

On 5 April 2023 the Welsh Women's Peace Petition, signed by almost 400,000 women a hundred years ago, was returned to Wales, to mark the centenary of the women-led, Welsh anti-war effort.

Since the Peace Petition returned to Wales the National Library of Wales has been planning an exciting crowdsourcing project which aims to find volunteers to transcribe the text found within the pages of the Peace Petition.

The aim of this transcription project is to create a complete transcription of the text found on each page of the Peace Petition and provide free access to it through a public interface.

In asking volunteers to undertake the huge task of recording the names and addresses of the women who signed the petition a hundred years ago, it is hoped that this will not only bring satisfaction to volunteers as they come across names or places familiar to them, but it will also allow the text to be fully searchable once the transcriptions have been completed. This will provide an accessible resource to a global audience.

The petition pages will be allocated to volunteer transcribers with each petition allocated to one member. Once this transcription is complete it will be reviewed to help ensure accuracy and the final transcriptions will be used to make the data fully searchable and readable on a new interface.

The Library is collaborating with the Welsh Centre for International Affairs (WCIA) and Academi Heddwch alongside their partners: Women's Archives Wales, Heddwch Nain Mamgu  and Amgueddfa Cymru to launch the national campaign to find volunteers to find out who exactly these women from Wales were who went in search of peace.