I’ll bet you haven’t heard the term Micro Volunteering before. I hadn’t, until I read this blog from the Wall Street Journal.  Basically it’s about using your internet enabled phone or smart device to translate a document or answer questions while you’re waiting for something else — like on the bus into work, or in an office waiting room.

I think this is a great idea for people who have an internet phone.  But for the rest of us, let me share something that I’m doing.  FamilySearch Indexing. “Volunteers extract family history information from digital images of historical documents to create searchable indexes that assist everyone in finding their ancestors.”  Sound daunting?  It really isn’t.  If you’ve ever been interested in family history work, this could be an opportunity for you.  Much of family history work that I’ve done has been to search through old documents looking for tidbits of information.  My favorite places to look are the US Census and death certificates.  So much information can be gleaned from those two documents.  But, unless you know where your ancestor died, or exactly where they were living during a census year, the information can be hard to find.  Enter the Family Search Indexing program.  People like you and me help make an index to these records.  In turn the index is available online here.  For FREE.

Millions of records have been index so far, but there’s still a lot more to be done.  If you have about 30 minutes a week, you can index a batch.  And the great thing about it — you can pick which project you index and take breaks.  It doesn’t have to be done all at once.  I’ll often start a batch and then get distracted by other responsibilities.  Then I can return and index a few more names.  By the end of the week,  I’m done with my batch.

Personal Benefits — I can tell you from experience that I’m thankful for others who’ve spent a little time indexing records.  It was because of these records that I was able to nail down info on a great grandfather and verify which William was the right one.  This saved me the hassle of contacting the overburdened county health department and the costs associated with getting a copy of the death certificate.

You might not directly help your own family research, but by spending just 30 minutes a week, you can help another researcher find clues to his or her past.

FamilySearch Indexing — http://www.familysearchindexing.org

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