Volunteering 3

So, I'm a genealogist... a family researcher... I love it!! Love exploring. Love sleuthing. Love digging stuff out of the past and making sense of it. Plus, I love organizing the information that I find and creating something comprehensible... I have a love affair with a website or two... http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/... for those of you with a Scottish background, you have been granted a gift from heaven. Everything digitized and online and indexed... Heavenly!!

Then there is http://www.rootsweb.com/ where you can search family trees submitted by other researchers... Very helpful and always being updated. You never know when you might find a long lost 6th cousin twice removed who's got the very same ancestors as you...

And then there is http://www.familysearch.org/, the offical website of the Mormons. They are genealogists extrordinaire... They go around the world microfilming various baptism/birth, marriage and death registries (pre 1900) and then making those microfilms available for loan through their local Family History Centre libraries... I have found tonnes of my ancestors on these microfilm. The only kicker is that they aren't really indexed... yet...

Well, the other day I was on their website and found they have a beta website being tested and it has an Indexing project on the go. I read a bit of information and it grabbed me... They are looking for volunteer indexers to help them index all their records (we're talking millions/billions). You get a bit of practice, download a program, get a batch of 30 records (tiny!), index the key information, submit it, and get credits for the number of names you have indexed. Reach a certain number of credits and you get premier access to more of their records. Yowsa!! I gave it a whirl and it's super easy... Once again, something grabbed me... I love family history... love data entry... love contributing back to an organization that has contributed so much to my own family history search... It's a match made in heaven... Count me in!!

So, once again, something found me... and it's something that dovetails nicely with my skills, talents, interests... perfect. Who knows what might show up next time...