Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing: Week 67

This has been a good week for me. Most of my Christmas shopping is now done and I still have some energy left. hehe!! The tree is up and Christmas music is playing in the background. It's about time that I got into the Christmas spirit.

I thought I better get my indexing done before they have the system shutdown tomorrow. The following email was posted on the FamilySearch Indexing website and in the application's My Messages.

December 12, 2008: System Downtime Rescheduled

The FamilySearch indexing system will be down for approximately 24 hours from 12:01am MST (GMT-7) on Tuesday, December 16th, to 12:01am on Wednesday, December 17th. Please submit or return all batches you have downloaded before 12:01am Tuesday morning. You will not be able to do any indexing until the system is back up.

THIS IS DIFFERENT FROM THE PAST WHEN YOU COULD DOWNLOAD SEVERAL BATCHES AND WORK OFFLINE. ANY BATCHES DOWNLOADED BEFORE TUESDAY AND NOT SUBMITTED BEFORE THE SYSTEM GOES DOWN WILL BE INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE NEW SYSTEM AND YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SUBMIT THEM.

During the downtime, we will be updating our databases. Indexers will not notice any significant updates to the indexing program.

We are hoping this process will not take the full 24 hours to complete. Please be patient and we will bring the system back up as soon as we possibly can.

This next message was also on the FSI website and in My Messages. The last paragragh was only in My Messages.

December 9, 2008: Progress of the 1916 Canadian Census

The 1916 Canadian Census project is now 100% complete! Thank you to our volunteers around the world who worked together to finish this project. Because of your response to our request for help, we were able to finish this project in just 29 days, about one-third of the time it would have taken without this united effort.

We genuinely value the hours you have devoted to this initiative. We will work as quickly as we can to make the indexes available on the FamilySearch Record Search pilot site (pilot.familysearch.org). Many previously completed indexes are already available on Record Search and can be searched for free anytime.

I guess I am really into the Massachusetts' 1920 U.S. Federal Censuses. I don't know off hand how many weeks I have been working on them. I did three batches of tonight of 50 individuals each. My grand total to date is 9855. I should be able to reach 10,000 records indexed next week.

The batches I worked on where from Boston. I was amazed at how many countries my individuals came from, i.e. Turkey, West Indies, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Greece. I sure hope I got their names right. At least the writing was very clear. Since I downloaded my batches all at the same time I actually indexed an A & B sheet for the same page. That was pretty cool, never done them in sequence before.

Well, I have a busy day ahead of me so I will leave you until next week.

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