Indexing

Last night for mutual our youth combined per a special request from the Bishop. Originally I just had this planned for the young women, but the bishopric is trying to push family history to all the youth in our ward, as are the apostles also (see https://www.lds.org/youth/family-history).

I myself feel really intimated by trying to search for ancestors, plus my parents have a good handle on our family tree, but I still feel like I should be involved in family history, and indexing is a wonderful and easy way to do that. Indexing involves viewing handwritten records (marriage, birth and death certificates, military enlistment forms, censuses, etc...) and typing them into a database so that those who  are searching for their ancestors can easily just do a text search through these records rather than spending hours looking through microfiche. Here are some great videos to introduce the topic: http://bcove.me/628xt280 and http://bcove.me/41ok3bjr

I found a great slideshow to use for our activity here: http://www.sugardoodle.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8808

On the Sunday before, I asked our Bishop for the membership numbers of all our youth so that each could create their own lds.org account and sign into the indexing program at their homes. We set a goal to do 1000 names as a group by July 4th. I was a little bummed because they just indexed the 1 billionth record a few days before our activity and I was hoping to use that as some motivation for the youth. Oh well. It was fun activity and I know some of the youth are excited to get into family history.



To download the indexing software, go here (you do have to download software to your computer):https://indexing.familysearch.org/newuser/nugetstarted.jsf. At this time they are working on building apps for phones and tablets, but for now you will need a computer.

For more resources, go here: https://indexing.familysearch.org/public/publications.jsf?lng=en-US

Also, here is a tutorial to take you through indexing (it also has a handout you can print out): http://broadcast.lds.org/elearning/FHD/Local_Support/FamilySearchIndexing/EN/Indexing/Lesson1/page8985.html