24 March 2011

FamilySearch Indexing - Can you spare 30 minutes?


Are you tired of the bad weather and need a great "feel good" project? Are you finding nothing good on TV these days? Are you into genealogy? Do you read a foreign language? Well here's a great activity for you to get involved in. It's FamilySearch Indexing


72% of the thousands of people who are indexing genealogical records right now claim they are motivated to do it just because they want to help provide free records to the genealogical community! Wouldn't you just love to see your great-grandfather's military record or a record of grandma's marriage?


FamilySearch has published over 1.5 billion records so far including extracted records! Yes that's BILLION! And the indexing project just started in 2006! There are billions more records available that need to be transcribed and it's so easy for you to help!


Just go to FamilySearch Indexing and click on "Get Started".  Fifteen to 30 minutes is all you need. Once you get the hang of it you will become addicted and really have fun. This can be a great family project. You know our young people -- they love their technology and find the process to be a great break from their daily homework and fast-paced life! And indexing is something you can do at midnight when you can't get to sleep or after you get the kids off to school each morning. Get a challenge going within your family or with a group of friends. Maybe you even belong to an organization and you are interested in specific records. Well you group can contact FamilySearch and make arrangements to index specific records.


FamilySearch has a goal of completing 220 million more records this year alone. Volunteers have indexed almost 46 million records so far this year. But your help is needed. If you can read a foreign language, indexing needs your help. Even if you don't, you can use the language information on FamilySearch Wiki and give another language a try. For instance, here is the Spanish Genealogy Word List and the French Word List


FamilySearch has a number of new features that will be added to the existing system sometime soon. You'll be able to see your accuracy rate, get RSS feeds, be able to invite a friend, and create links from the old extracted records to their respective images. They are also working on creating an app for your mobile device! So lets all pass this info along and gather some extra help in getting these records available to the world for FREE.

1 comment:

  1. Seems like it has to be given a try.I am not a geologist but a Granite Worktops supplier but my interests in geaology are the source of inspiration to make me a granite discoverer and dealer

    ReplyDelete