Indexing

I received a new church calling in January. The Stake Family History Director and Indexing Director. A stake is comprised of usually 10 wards. A ward is a specific area with about 500 or so members. That being said, I have a specific time that I am at the Stake Center in a room to help anyone with their family history or indexing. Thursday evenings. It is very rewarding to have people come and to link those of their ancestors to their family trees.

Lately though, I have found joy in indexing. Indexing is where a person has scanned or taken a photo of a document (i.e., birth or death certificate, marriage license, draft card, voting records, ships logs or census records) and made it available for those willing, to read those images and type the information on to the computer. These are then made available to those searching over the internet for lost loved ones. Two people index the same image and if there are any differences, it is sent to an arbitrator that makes the final decision before it is released into cyber space. It's all fascinating! By doing this I provide others a way to find the information they might be looking for.

The first of April, the 1940 USA Census was released. In the first week 17,000,000 names were indexed. There are over 132,000,000 that need to be indexed with in 6 months. I am grateful to be part of such a great thing. If any of you would like to index you can go to www.familysearch.org and get started. There is a tutorial you can watch. You won't be sorry you did.