Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing - Week 42

Happy Mothers Day! I hope all you mothers out there had as great a day as I did.

I haven't been the only Zamora in my household working on FamilySearch Indexing. My daughter is recovering nicely now from knee surgery and at the point that she is bored. I told her how easy it was to index the Irish vital records and she was ready to give it a go. I haven't stopped into the bedroom to see if she has finished the batch yet but she was working on some marriage indexes the last time I checked.

I also worked on the Irish Marriage Indexes 1845-1868 and completed one batch with 359 individuals and I got credit for indexing 359 records. Yes, thats right they have stopped giving you credit for records that you mark blank. The set number of records for my batch was 80 and then I had to add more rows to the batch to cover everyone else. I am so glad they are giving you credit for indexing how many individuals on the page and not some preconceived number. My grand total of records indexed to date is 7,436 - Wahoo!

We received a new message from headquarters this week.

From: Headquarters
Subject: Great Work!
Date: 06 May 2008

To all indexers, arbitrators, and group administrators:
Congratulations! As of 5:30pm today, we have over 140,000 registered users who have indexed over 50,000,000 names so far this year.

Thank you and keep up the great work!

Can you believe that - 50 million names in a little over 4 months - that is fantastic!!

With all that was going on in my life last week I forgot to mention that FamilySearch Record Search - where you can see some of the results of our indexing efforts, just released pilot version 1.3.

A few of the highlights of this release:

• Search for christening and burial events
• Search at the county and city level
• You can now do different kinds of searches including exact
• In-context view of record details and images. This provides a new summary view of all the results next to the details and image views
• Name of person featured more prominently in the record
• Common actions grouped together at the top of record details
  

I only had a chance to play around on Records Search for a little while today. I really like how I can type in a place with no name and it will bring me back the results of all the names that have been indexed there. I used to have to just start looking at the images after finding the locality in a project - very time consuming that other way. Indexed results are much quicker to move through than reading the image. I do a lot of research in a given locality so seeing the indexed results are very helpful for me this way. You can also refine your searches or start over. I don't know you probably could of done that before but I don't recall previously doing that.

I also noticed that FamilySearch Record Search is also using the standardized names for localities. When you type in a locality name it will present to you the standards used for it - this way you can make sure you have the correct and full locality name. I knew new FamilySearch was using the standards on localities but I didn't realize Record Search has the same feature. If you weren't aware of this previously you can see the standard for names, places and dates on another project on FamilySearch Labs called Standard Finder. It's kinda cool.

Well, my computer only needed to be rebooted once while writing this article. And, I thought it was beginning to behave itself. I just received today a "new" computer. It's used, about 2-3 years old - much newer than the one I currently have. I want to buy a larger hard drive for it before I transfer everything over. It's for sure cheaper to purchase a new hard drive than to buy a new computer. I don't know how long that project will take me but hopefully before this old one quits on me.

I have a lot of work to do and articles to write. Yesterday I attended the UVPAFUG meeting where Ancestral Quest, Family Insight and RootsMagic gave wonderful demonstrations on how they will sync with new FamilySearch. They all have unique and have different approaches on how they will sync. I hope to write that article real soon.

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