A couple of months ago, we had a man come to our ward and talk to all the adults about the new way genealogy and temple work is going to be done. All the changes they're making are going to make submitting names for temple work and tracking what's been done on those names so much easier and more efficient. The project I was most excited about is called Family Search Indexing. The Church is creating a searchable database of all the records pertaining to family history, and anyone who wants to can volunteer to transcribe names from images of old Census records, birth records, death certificates, etc. Go to http://familysearchindexing.org/ to get started. The oldest records I've worked on so far are Revolutionary War Pension records from the late 1700's.
The other day, I was working on a 1900 Census record from Kansas. The last family/household on the record was made up of a bunch of brothers and sisters, no parents. They also had two lodgers living with them. I noticed that the first lodger, a 27 year old man, was from Utah and the second, a 24 year old man who'd been married for 3 years, was from Idaho. So I was curious about what they were doing there, and scrolled over to the far right of the census image where occupations are listed. Their occupations were listed as "Traveling preacher" and "Mormon preacher." It was so exciting to stumble across a couple of missionaries from over a hundred years ago! I felt like I knew them.
I've gotten totally addicted to indexing. I set a goal of doing one Census page per day (about 50 names) which takes me about half an hour or less. So far, I've extracted about 8,000 names. You should do it, too; you can index between games of Solitaire or Free Cell, and then you'll feel good about wasting time on the computer!
3 comments:
That poll on anna's blog is so cool! i made one on mine... feel free to vote!
I didn't completely understand what you were telling me about the missionaries when we were talking on the phone, but now it all makes sense. That is so awesome!
OK--so I'm six months late, but that is so cool! Honestly I haven't been scrolling over to the right that much because they aren't needing that info to be indexed, but I'm going to start now. You do feel a connection with history and our forebearers somehow when indexing, don't you? I so do too!
And I totally agree about feeling better to waste time on the computer if I'm indexing as well. My little goal was to spend only as much time on the internet or blogging or whatever as I did on indexing. OK, so I haven't exactly reached that goal yet, but its still there for me. At least I'm off my little Bouncing Balls (Yahoo game) and Scrabble for now, so that's a start!
Its fun to find a fellow indexer, and honestly I'm surprised that more people don't do it! Aren't you? So carry on, my wayward (? NOT!) friend! :)
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