Genealogy – I am Doing It!!

Most people know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church) is very interested in genealogy.   The church has a repository for microfilmed records of all kinds—census records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, parish records, and all sorts of stuff from all over the world—in Utah called the Granite Mountain Records Vault.  Some of these records now only exist as microfilm because the original records have been destroyed by fire, floods, etc.

Last year I decided to try it myself.  I went to the Family Search website.  Here you can search the records already “indexed” by volunteers the world over.  So wherever you may be in the world you can type in an ancestor’s name and see what records are available.  In mere seconds you have access to all the genealogical data available from census records to family pedigrees entered by others.

Another part of this website is devoted to “indexing”.  What is indexing you might be asking?  Indexing is simply typing the information found on a digital image of some microfilmed record.  Once you have typed the information you have converted it into searchable data for anyone to access for free on the Family Search website.

What do you need to index?  A computer, an internet connection, the ability to type, and a little time.  Since you are reading this blog that means you have all four of these things!

What do you index?  Well it all depends on what you choose to index.  If you are doing an U.S. census record (a page completed by a census worker) you enter the census page number, the family number, given name, surname, sex (male/female), age, marital status, place born, father’s place of birth, mother’s place of birth, year of immigration.  That is only eleven bits of information and half of it will auto-fill once you have entered it once.  One page usually has 50 lines so you are entering between 500 and 550 bits of information.

How long does indexing take?  The short answer is it depends, but the real answer is as little as 20 minutes.  A batch of “beginning” records goes quickly.  The page is some kind of form (a census record primarily) that has a little color prompt that migrates across the page prompting you what should be entered.

I opened my indexing account on August 23, 2009.  Since then I have indexed 6,153 records.  Yes, it keeps track of every record I have indexed!  I do it when I have time.  You download a “batch” and have a week to return it.  I find once I start I keep going.  And when I go several months without doing anything no one is bugging me about it.

So what does this mean for you?  Well, there are billions of records that need indexing.  There is a goal to index 220 million records this year!  That is right in a year’s time.  I am getting updated on the progress through the website and so far that goal can’t be reached without more people like me giving up a little time to volunteer.

Sign up and find out how fun entering information from a census record from 1930 can be.  You may find yourself wandering the halls of a tenement building New York entering the last names of people starting with O’ or Mc.  You might find yourself wandering a dusty road in Georgia entering the names of cotton and tobacco farmers whose only contact with a non-family member may have been the census worker who walked up to their doorstep on that hot, muggy day.  

You might be entering the marriage record of a veteran returning from war wedding the sweetheart he hoped he would make it home to see.  You might be entering the birth certificate of the baby child that someday ended up being your grandmother’s best friend.  Anything is possible.

Indexing isn’t just a jumble of names on a sheet of paper.  Indexing is a window into the past.  If you step outside of yourself as you type, you can almost envision the person.  Everyone of us needs that perspective.  Too often this life and this culture is centered on ME.  This is a world with 4 billion current inhabitants and billions that have come before us.  Indexing reminds me that it is WE and US.  So join me and the thousands of others worldwide making this world a little bit smaller one name at a time.  I know it will be worth the time.