This House is for the Birds

Life at the house has been one big pain in the you know where.  Several months ago we began noticing the hardwood floor in our kitchen was warping.  We were unable to find the source of the water causing the damage.  Had the hardwood floor guy, a plumber, and a restoration guy take a look to no avail.
That was until a couple of weeks ago after taking off the cabinet doors under the sink and the toe kick to the dishwasher.  The sink had clogged (you gotta love home ownership) and Drano didn’t cut the mustard.  With the sink backed up what do you do in a busy house – you have to keep washing dishes.  So with a clogged drain the dishwasher can’t empty.
The dishwasher has this sensor, I have learned by reading the owner’s manual, that tells the dishwasher to stop putting water in the dishwasher when the water level gets too high.  Problem with our dishwasher is when it gets to that point it begins leaking water from the location of the sensor (not supposed to be an added feature of this sensor).  So very hot water is dripping onto the hardwood floors and providing the floor with lots of water to soak up in our dry climate.  Can’t wait to deal with the home owner’s insurance to try and get this taken care of!
Then about a week ago our wonderful refrigerator stopped making ice.  This may have been going on for months, but when it has been as wet and mild for so long you aren’t reaching for ice often.  Well we have lots of experience with this kind of thing.  In the six years of living in this house three major repairs have had to be made to the fridge that came with the house – fan was replaced, condenser was replaced, and thermostat was replaced.
A very helpful technicians from Famous Appliance Service spent several hours trying to find the cause of our latest predicament.  Turns out the fridge wasn’t rejecting any of its transplants (fan, condenser, thermostat) but rather bleeding internally (i.e. leaking refrigerant in the back wall).  It was time to, literally, pull the plug on this patient.
So off it went to be replaced by a new fridge.  Sorry Mark, GE’s employee discount couldn’t compete with a 4th of July sale at RC Willey.
The flip side of having lived here six years is our trees are now big enough for birds to consider taking up residence.  A robin made a nest in our front yard this spring.  We discovered this several weeks ago after hearing all the noise being made.  Looking at the nest now I am glad I don’t always bag my grass.  It made the work of building this nest easier because there was a lot of building materials close by.  Watching mother bird making innumerable trips back and forth to feed her three chicks has been a family hobby for the past couple of weeks.

Along with the robins are the visiting ducks.  Yes it has been that wet here in Utah!  Ilene and Hallie have named them Sparky and Violet.

Yesterday the robins left the nest.  One was in the flower bed around 8 am.  We were afraid this one had been pushed out so I put on a glove and tried to put it back into the nest.  Well I didn’t get a hold of it because it squawked and hopped away.  Mother robin was soon screaming at me.
The last of the chicks wasn’t ready to leave the nest and sat on the nest all day.  Here it is reluctantly considering whether to leave the nest (it is clearly too big). 

So while the kitchen is still a problem life is pretty good.

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.