Saturday, February 4, 2012

More about volunteer indexing

A few weeks back I wrote about volunteer indexing at Family Search. Family Search provides a wonderful free resource to the genealogy community by providing free access to many of the records held by the LDS. By the way, here is my post earlier this month.

Now that I've done a few sets of records. I can tell you a bit more about my experience. As I said then you can do it at home on your computer. It involves installing a small program from FamilySearch and that it easy to do. They start you off with some small batches of fairly simple records. You download an image of the records to be indexed.

Then when you are ready, you get to choose from a variety of projects with various levels of difficulty assigned. So far I've stuck to beginner records and there are several ongoing projects at that level. They are not hard but sometimes the handwriting is difficult to decipher. If you consider a batch too difficult or unclear, you can return it.

My understanding is that 2 indexers do each record and if they disagree, a third more experienced indexer looks at the record. So I don't worry that if I am wrong on something, the index will be wrong. My work is checked one way or another.

Last week I looked at 1871 English census records and at WW1 draft registration records.

This is a great way to contribute a little bit of time to make it better for all of us in the genealogy community.

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