What you see on the top 2/3 of the screen is a scanned page of the 1900 U.S. Census. This one's from Wisconsin. One page has room for 50 people, and apparently the way they did it back then was that census takers would go door-to-door and write down every household's information. The benefit of that to us is that full page is all written in the same person's handwriting, making it easier to decipher. (If you click on the above image, it may open a bigger image for you to see it more clearly.)So all we have to do is look at these documents and type the names & other vital info so that it's in digital format, and this helps other people with their genealogy (spreadsheet on the bottom 1/3 of the screen). I just learned about this on Sunday when our ward family history specialist taught the combined 3rd hour lesson on it. Of course, I'm hooked. It's so easy. You just go to FamilySearch Indexing and they tell you what to do. (If you already have a FamilySearch login, you need to create a new one for this. It's two separate things.) You download a batch of 50 people (one census page, for example; but some of them are birth or death certificates) and you don't even have to finish it all at once; you have a week to complete & submit it. It only takes an average of 30 minutes to do one batch of 50; I've been doing about a batch a day. The program (free download) is very user-friendly and it's fast & easy to get the fields populated. If you don't like a particular census-taker's handwriting or the names are foreign & too hard to figure out, you can reject the batch & download a new one. Easy peasy.
It's so interesting! I've been doing a bunch of German, Dutch, and Swedish immigrants who moved to Wisconsin in the late 1800's. Really fascinating. Like the father of 6 kids whose wife had recently died and his occupation is listed as "Scavenger." Or a German family whose last name I Googled to see if it was really a last name, only to find their son on Wikipedia because he grew up to be a US Senator. But the most interesting thing I've seen so far was a couple in West Virginia who had been married for 10 years and had 5 kids... and their current ages were 26 and 21. Meaning they got married when they were 16 and 11! (Insert churlish West Virginia Hollows joke here.)
If you're LDS you can enter your ward & stake when you register to do it; apparently there's a stake in Utah that has done over 3 million names! But anyone can do it; you do not have to be LDS. This is a great way to "work on family history" if you don't know what you can do; if pedigree charts intimidate you and terms like PAF and GEDCOM may as well be Greek.
So... let's get indexing!
(I couldn't come up with a more catchy closing line than that. Sad, I know.)
4 comments:
I totally downloaded all the stuff and did my first batch a while back ... and then it never sent due to some computer glitch. But now you have me all motivated to resolve the problem.
Gooo indexing!
I never even heard of this until you brought it up the other day. Why am I so behind in the realm of family history??
Thanks for the tips!
great job sara! my bishop was asking me to do this the other day. much more productive than blogging, i presume.
ps. since you and my hubby are now old friends! :), our last name is Horn (but sshhh, don't tell, we're trying to remain anonymous). and i highly doubt that neal was remixing depeche mode in his room, but you never know. :)
I'm feelin' the love too. Indexing, indexing, rah, rah, rah! Gooooooo, team!
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