Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing - Week 6

It's late for me to be doing my Indexing on Sunday but it just seemed the right time. I don't know if it was just that I've now been indexing for 6 weeks that made such a difference this time or not. I seemed to just whiz thorough my batches. The images didn't appear any clearer so I'm not sure what the deal was this week.

I did two batches tonight. The first was Salt Lake County Births 1908-1915. It was very different from the census records but it was fun to do. I did 24 records and they were all from 1909. I wanted to do another batch but when I tried to download it said there were no more index records to do.

Since the birth records weren't available to do I decided to just let the program pick a batch for me. I got the 1900 U.S. Federal Census for Tennessee. I don't know what it is with Tennessee but that's all I ever get when I let the program decide.

First I had to set up my highlights for the record. I tried to remember but I had to go back to my earlier blog article where I had a PDF of how to Adjust the Highlights. That came in very helpful and I got the job done very quickly. Once again the records weren't any different from the ones I have done before but the job just went so much quicker. I almost wished I had timed myself!

The only thing different during this indexing session was that I had KZION playing on my computer. They play really great LDS music. I guess I will have to try that again. Maybe I'm more relaxed and better able to index if I listen to motivating music. More conductive to the spirit helping you. Whatever it is, it was great, and if it wasn't so late I would of kept indexing.

Oh, I also didn't download my batches before Sunday. I did them today and had no problem downloading or uploading my files. I don't know if it is because I did them later in the evening or if the church has fixed the problems with the servers. It could be that the new servers are on line now. I mentioned them in an earlier article today "NFS Fireside I Would Love to Attend". They are scaling up the servers to hopefully handle 3 million names a day.

It appears us indexers are doing a fantastic job. The arbitrators that compare extraction batches are finding that indexers are working at about 99.7% accuracy. What a phenomenal job! Right now just over half the indexers are retired but the rest are made up of teenagers and young parents and people like....this story I found on a mailing list.

Speaking of indexing...

I just spoke to a brother in our ward who is a quadraplegic. He has very limited use of his hands. He was telling me how excited he was at doing some indexing at home. It takes him awhile to finish a batch, obviously, but it humbled me so much to hear him talk about the indexing project, and me working overtime at my job and able-bodied and say to myself, "well, I don't have any time this week to do a batch, maybe next week." I need to repent and go back to indexing.

Joan in NC

I also had a reader email this week and ask a question.

Hello,

I am on dialup service for my internet and have been told that it is not condusive to doing the indexing project. I would be interested to know if there are current indexers that use dialup for their service and how it works for them.

Don

If you have any knowledge to share about your experience using dialup service for indexing let me know and I will pass the word along. Email me at: zamora05@hotmail.com

My total tonight was 74 indexed names, with a grand total of 374 for my overall job. Not to bad - for me! I'm going to go eat an ice cream cone and celebrate.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!