Caught the Indexing Bug

Last Tuesday, I was sitting on the couch and noticed the August Ensign was sitting on the table still in the plastic so I pulled it out and started leafing through it. What caught my eye was an article on a new program the church is introducing called "Indexing." I was immediately fascinated by it.

Basically, indexing is related to extraction work, only now anyone with Internet access can help out. You go to www.familysearchindexing.org and download the program, sign up and poof, you are now an official indexer for the church.

This work is in my blood. My Grandma spent many, many hours working in the extraction program for the church. My Aunt Maurine, would use a pencil to press the keys on the keyboard to enter names and places into the computer because her hands were too disabled to type anymore. And I am always saying I need a project to do. This seemed like the perfect thing for me.

Here we are 5 days later and I have already entered 1000 names. The current project is the 1900 census and most of the names I've been entering have been from Mississippi and Texas, but I have also worked on Virginia and Illinois too. Some might consider it mind numbing to endlessly read images and type what they say but to me it is very interesting. I wonder what these individuals and families lives must have been like.

Yesterday, I noticed in a batch from Mississippi there were several widows and widowers in their 20s and I wondered what would have taken so many so young. And then there were the former slaves who didn't even know the month they were born or where their parents were born, or maybe they did, but didn't trust the government enough to share that information. Today as I was entering the name of young boys, I wondered if they later served in WWI and how many of them weren't around for the 1920 census because of that.

I know none of this is actually my business but I am kind of curious. And I also hope that by doing this, I can help someone find information about their family that will provide the missing information they have been looking for. And at least I am not just wasting my time, doing who knows what. I've set a goal to do 4000 names this month and I am well on my way!