A few weeks ago I was visiting family and went to church in their ward. Our lesson in priesthood meeting wasn't from Teaching of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, but was a special lesson about indexing on FamilySearch.org.
I've done some indexing before and I thought it was a lot of fun. Angie got into it too and she did even more than I did. I was about to say, "I don't remember why I stopped indexing," but then remembered why. The records that were available to download were so hard to read that I couldn't contribute. I'd download a batch and try to decipher some names, but couldn't do much. There were some Brazilian census records back then so I thought it would be awesome to give those a shot. I served a mission in Brazil so I knew I'd recognize some names. Well, it happened to be the same story. I could read some, couldn't read others. So I stopped.
Lots of time has past - probably a year and a half or two years. I never checked the indexing database in the meantime for legible records. After this lesson a few weeks ago I got really interested again. The demo that day was of some really legible documents so I came home, loaded the software on my laptop and away I went.
The first projects that I saw on there were census records from the 1800s as well as passenger records. The census records were from New York. I think they were only from 1865, but there may have been other years. I thought it was kinda funny that the census was on a non-decadal year and how we got on a different track than that. Just a curiosity, but I like thinking about that kind of stuff.
The census records usually have a whooooooooole bunch of people on them. It feels like it takes forever to index names like that if I base it on how often I finish and upload batches. That's not the real goal here, it's the overall project. But there is a certain satisfaction that comes from finishing something, uploading it and downloading another.
The passenger records were quite different. Lots of them only have a single name on them. Talk about simple! Some of the passengers' gender was recorded with just a check mark! Ha! I loved thinking about who these people were, why they were leaving Europe (some Prussia and Bavaria) to come to America (mostly New York and Baltimore). Were they seeking a land of new opportunity? Catching up with family? I don't know, but I'd love to find out. It's so fascinating!
Ah, I just remembered that I also got some records of servicemen joining the military to fight in the Spanish War. Crazy daisy! Joining the military makes me nervous so I was a little nervous for them.
I don't know how many people around the world are helping with this indexing project, but I know it's a lot. Have you helped?
