Family History Indexing Report

Indexing is the process of putting indexes, or researched ancestral information, for record collections.  This allows researchers to quickly find records for specific individual.  It gives them access to these indexes online and allows them to search through them electronically.

            Over the past 4 weeks, I spent over 7 hours of indexing.  I was planning on only spending 5, as per the assignment, but I got so into it and lost track of time.  I started off with doing the batches from the United States and found that I could do some other areas.  I started doing England and Australia and then I even did a few that were Russian.  I am not sure what record type is but I am assuming it is the type of record that was submitted.  I mainly did people that travelled on ships.  The time period varied between 1850-1945.

The screen shot above was pretty difficult.  Russian script is very difficult to read.  I actually brought it to someone that is from Russia and they were able to help me with the rest of the batch.  I tried not to reject any of the batches that I did.  I know that it doesn’t get submitted as final until a few people go through each entry and have the same entries. 

Over the past 4 weeks, I was able to submit 85 batches.  Some were longer than others and some had only one name but I tried to work as fast as I could so I could get to more names.  I never used arbitration and am still confused how to use it for submitting my indexes.  I was indexing and it seemed to be a lot of single people and then I came upon a family of 6 people.  I thought it was really nice and I thought in my head that I was helping a family find their ancestors and maybe they are able to add an entire family to their ancestor list.

A lot of the text that I came across was typed but some of it was difficult to read.  I tried to sound out the letters before it and after to make a common name.  That seemed to be the easiest way of doing it.  I would definitely recommend indexing to others because it is a lot of fun and it also has a really important meaning behind it.  It allows people to find their family members from documents that they would normally not be able to search.