I participated in the Worldwide Indexing Event this past weekend. I’m so glad I did! I’m really grateful to Family Search for making it so easy.
By all appearances, the Worldwide Indexing Event was a big success. Almost 80,000 people participated and 7.2 million records were indexed. I indexed 541 of those records.
I ended up working at the intermediate level, indexing school censuses from Oklahoma schools in the first few decades of the 20th century. These were handwritten cards, each listing a parent and that parent’s children’s names, birth dates and ages. It was fun seeing the names and the birth dates of these kids–some of these families were large!
As I indexed, I realized that I was gaining new insights that would help me in my own genealogy research. I think seeing the challenges of interpreting handwriting, as well as the sloppiness of some of the enumerators, will help me come up with creative searches when I can’t find an ancestor in an index.
Being an indexer also made me realize how easy it is for mistakes to be made. Family Search makes indexing really easy, but if I hadn’t double-checked my work, many August birth dates would have been recorded as April. And a few boys with names like Marion would have been indexed as girls. I’m glad there are arbitrators checking the work, but now when I see errors in an index, I’m going to have a better understanding of how that happened.
Now that I’ve dipped my toe in the indexing pool, I’m going to try to do some indexing for Family Search on a regular basis. If you haven’t tried it, I encourage you to give it a try. Just go to FamilySearch.org, log in, and click Indexing at the top of the screen.
Indexing made me more ‘forgiving’ of mistakes in indexes, too. I hope to have more time to index in the future. I enjoyed it.
Absolutely! It really shifted my perspective, which is so nice.
If each of us, or many of us, does a little, a lot gets done. I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing.
Thank you for the post Janine.
Yes indeed. Talk about making a giant project accessible! Hats off to the many folks at Family Search who organized this mammoth undertaking.
I also enjoyed my participation. At the intermediate level, I indexed baptism and church records in Georgia. In the cases where I could not make a distinction between letters, I was able to double-check family records on Ancestry. I am happy to report that in every case I was able to find my answers. I totally agree with you on how easy it can be for some names, dates, etc to be recorded or transcribed incorrectly, and get “lost” among the records. Participation really raises your awareness, and reminds us to persevere in locating records we know exist “somewhere.” The answer may be as simple as the recorder writing the information as they “heard it” ( for example, “Samil” for Samuel), or being transcribed inaccurately due to one’s interpretation of the handwriting.
Yes! I also used Ancestry to help me figure out some of the handwriting. It was really fun! I agree with you 100% about the value of participating in indexing. Thanks for commenting!
I missed the event this year, but no worries, indexing happens all year long! I agree with all the comments about how much insight can be gained by participating.
Good point, Hazel. No one has to wait for an event to get started! I was grateful for the event because it prompted me to start. And I’ll keep going with it!