Join us for a Worldwide Indexing Event – 72,000 people indexing for during 72 hours
Join us at FamilySearch.org/WorldsRecords
#TheWorldsRecords
Watch our recorded Live video on How to Index see below
Many of you may not know me but I’m Matt the hubby to A Thrifty Mom. I’m the silent one on our site. One thing that many who know me will tell you is that I love to search my family tree. When I was younger I always wanted to know where I came from. For years we thought our last name, Barrand was German. We knew my mom’s side was Irish also because her name is Lyons. I used to fill out those paper family pedigree forms for Boy Scout merit badges and could only fill up one sheet to the great grand parents. And that didn’t satisfy my search to know where I came from. I think the drive that I had stemmed from not having any close family. Both my grandparents disowned my parents either due to religion or due to my parents not having money to send to their parents to “support” their laziness. I didn’t have uncles or aunts or cousins to talk to or play with. I never got to go to grandma’s house to play. I only had my parents and my brothers and sister.
The Barrand Cousinade (reunion) in 2013 in France
When the internet first came around I used to type in our last name over and over to see if there was any correlation to other people. Well since the late 80’s and early 90’s things have changed big time. Now in my family tree I have over 70,000 names in my family. I know the Barrand family were some of the original families in Fort Wayne Indiana and that they originally came from an area in eastern France called Franche-Comte and the town of Avoudrey. Where we have them dated back to the mid 1400’s. A couple years ago I even got to go to the “Barrand Cousinade” which is like a family reunion for all the Barrand cousins, mainly all from eastern France. My wife and I were the first Barrand’s from the USA to attend. It was so much fun to be with and stay in the area that you know your ancestors all came from!
A document of a land deed from the Barrand family from 1712!!!! Yes from before our constitution! I took careful pictures of all of the documents while in France, about 1200 photos laid out on a table and categorized photo was taken.
How to Index / What is Indexing
How did I get all of those names in my tree now? Well it was by the hard work of volunteers, originally at libraries and organizations who would take a picture of an old document like a church baptism record then typed the text on to a paper to have it entered later into a computer so that search engines could scan it and suggest it to others looking for those terms. Recently this same process has gotten so much easier and there are more and more names that “pop up” in search results every day now. It’s Amazing! But it is still done by volunteers like me and you. Right now Family Search.org/WorldsRecords is doing a world wide event for indexing family names. We are trying to get 72,000 people to index at least on set of records during a 72 hour period. Now this doesn’t mean you have to index for 72 hours non-stop, although it is very addicting. It just means that you spend about 20 or 30 minutes indexing one batch of records. That’s it!
All you do is install the free software, register your info, and it assigns you a batch, or a group of similar records, to transpose from the image to the blank areas in text form. That way Google, MSN, Yahoo and all the search engines can now “see” what the record says so that people searching for the relatives can find it. I have had friends say that they have even randomly been assigned their own relatives to transpose or “index”. Wow what a special moment they had!
If you have ever done any genealogical work searching on websites like FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com or other genealogy sites and you just know that your relative is out there some where but nothing is coming up? Then you know the emptiness you feel when nothing shows in the search results. Somewhere out there is a record of your relative that is waiting to be searched by Google or other search engines. But the only way it is going to get online is by someone manually typing that name into the internet! That could be you that enters your fourth great grandmother, or your third cousin in the indexing form. Or you could be helping someone else find their missing link in their family tree that opens a entire new world to their lonely life like what I had before I started my huge family tree that I now have.
So have some fun, try it out, if only for 20 minutes and just try one indexing batch with us this weekend!
Join us at FamilySearch.org/WorldsRecords
Volunteers?have made over one billion historic records searchable online since FamilySearch introduced online indexing in 2008. The demand for indexed records continues to grow as millions of historical records worldwide are added every year. To join 72,000 teammates in saving the World’s records, visit?https://familysearch.org/worldsrecords.
Watch our recorded Live video on How to Index
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Confession time (don’t judge me)…. Last night my kids carved pumpkins. They all separated the pumpkins seeds for me to make into roasted pumpkin seeds (they look forward to this tradition each year). Little Maveric spent almost an hour picking them out one, by one. They put them all in a bag, as I saw the big bag of sloppy, slimy seeds I felt rather overwhelmed.
