A few weeks ago in Sunday School, the Family History Consultant for our ward told us about the “New Family Search” site (http://www.new.familysearch.org)and also talked about adults AND youth volunteering to do indexing. Ken and I came home and registered on the new site and poked around a bit. The really fun thing for me was to see my family tree already filled out. It’s generated by church records, so the people who have been members or had their temple work done are already there. No data entry required, no uploading gedcoms, just there! (For non-LDS members, the familysearch.org site is still the place to go).

A couple years ago I gathered a bunch of information on family members of one line on my mom’s side (Ballard/Havens) and I pulled out the folder and entered them all in. The great thing about this new site is that they have you check to see if you’ve duplicated a person who has already been entered. This gives me a bit more confidence in my information because I can make sure I’m not redoing something that’s already been done. It’s been fun and I’ve been to the BYU family history library twice this week to get copies of pedigree charts in books they have on fiche. Overall, this is a far easier experience than it was just 2 years ago. President Hinckley was definitely inspired to ask for the creation of such a program.

As far as indexing goes, James(15) has indexed (indexing is entering data from census images into forms so the text is searchable) about 60 names so far and we’ve asked him to spend about 15 minutes a day on it before he plays computer games. Who’d have thought volunteer work could be done on a computer? To volunteer any time, any place, any attire(my favorite part), go HERE.

I scanned some of my mom’s photos a while back and I particularly appreciate one very old photo of four generations of my ancestors. Combined with another photo from my own life, there are 6 generations. Pretty cool! The woman on the left in the first photo is the woman holding me in the photo below.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.