Sunday we had a lesson on indexing. If you’re LDS or enthralled by family history then you probably know what I’m talking about. Indexing is basically transcribing old records into a usable and searchable digital format. Old records like census records, military records, and the like are common. These records are then used by the Church, family members, and genealogists to map out family trees. the results are often associated with the elderly in your church and communities using their last remaining years bringing together the family once more. There’s a joke that the only people that are interested in family history are old people, because they are so close to becoming it!
Despite the preconceptions, I’ve felt for a while that I should get involved. Memorial Day seemed a good time to remember those that had gone before, so I got started.
To download FamilySearch‘s indexing program was easy. Click Indexing at the top, and getting started. There’s a couple video tutorials and they makes it overly easy. Remember, they’re catering to the “nearly dead” demographic. If you’re grandma can do it, then you’ll have no problems. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can simply enter their record number and birth date, the system is connected to the Church and it does the rest. For those interested in genealogy but have not interest in the the Church, there’s a place for you to easily sign up as well. Did I say it was easy? Seriously. Remember the grandmas?
The program downloads to your computer and basically does everything for you, except the indexing. Well, it actually does some of that for you too. You never have to save anything, and the program guides you through nearly every step. There are even simple indexing cards available for training. All you have to do is enter in a name, city, age, marital status, and some other things in the appropriate fields and boom! You’re well on your way to becoming a full-fledged indexer.
Being in the industry that I am, something I like to call “the Internet”, I relate what indexing is to enter CAPTCHAs. Captcha, in case you didn’t know or have an insatiable desire to learn things, stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. A captcha takes an image of letters and asks the user what it says. Computers can’t tell because it’s an image. If computers could tell what it was consistently do you think over 100,000 people would be indexing in their free time? No.
With over a BILLION names that need to be “indexed”, there isn’t an imminent threat of running out of names. Why not just use these names AS captchas? I’m sure someone else has thought of that but the problem there is we don’t know what it says. We could make a two part captcha. The first part is just entering what you think it is, and the second part is also entering what you think it is but the second one’s been done once already. If you enter the same thing as the previous person then you get pass! You usually have to enter it twice anyway, right?
I digress. It feels good to be a part of something I believe is important. Creating the human race’s family tree won’t be easy, but I’m happy to help. It’s hard to describe my feelings, looking at names and knowing these people lived lives very much like my own. I took the time to look up a few names that struck me. One was age 5 when the 1930 census was taken. He was born in a city I drove through this weekend. He would become a World War II soldier 13 years later. He doesn’t know me, I don’t know him. But he fought for me, my family, and our country. In that way we’re connected.
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