FamilySearch Indexing
For the past two weeks I have been working on the FamilySearch
Indexing project. This is something that I read about at church and felt that
it would be an important program to participate in.
The FamilySearch Indexing project is being run by the LDS
Church and is one of the ways that they will be indexing all of the content that
they have digitized out of their vault. I have blogged in
the past about how excited I am to have this information made readily available to
everyone. For this reason I have felt that it is important for me to help out as much
as I can.
When participating in the project you download a software application that allows
you to do the indexing. You are given a choice of different
areas to begin indexing. Many of the areas deal with census data, but there are
some birth and death indexes as well. I have mostly been working on West Virginia
Births as it is a smaller database and a good place to learn how to read different
handwriting. The software displays your batch which consists of a single page image.
From this image you begin typing data into the project form. The software is easy
to use and gives you many tools to assist in deciphering the handwriting.
I received a message from the project yesterday saying that in January of 2006 there
were around 150,000 names entered. In January of 2007 there were around 3 million.
This is a tremendous increase and shows how involvement in this project is taking
off.
I would encourage everyone to help with this project. The faster that this data gets
indexed the faster it will be made available for us to do our research from the comfort
of our home without having to pay subscription fees.
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