Photoessay #2078 - Indexing

I found a completely habit-forming activity.  Do not start doing this even if you have a little extra time.

Indexing the 1940 census.

With no qualifications whatsoever, you can index 1940 census records for familysearch.org, the LDS genealogy site.

They have a pretty good interface, maybe I would make some changes but basically it's easy to use.  After you've done a few records with just one name, they give you a bunch of choices in the 1940 census and you're hit with 40 lines of handwriting.  Interesting that they are just picking up certain items at this time.

Warninig: if you've saved work on their server, come back and finish it, be very careful to select 'submit' rather than 'retrieve from server' or you will lose all your work since you saved it.  Ask me how I know.

You enter the fields they want for the 40 lines go through a validation process and submit.  Within a day, you can see a review of your work with somebody who does know what they're doing, make corrections and show how it's supposed to be.  Great because I wanted to know what I was doing wrong.  My score on my first few batches was only 88% but I'm getting better.

So you get your very own page from the census to enter.  You get to pick the state.  A great collective effort to get the information available for everybody.  Familysearch.org does not charge, you can find anything they have for free.

On a related front, I've found another third cousin, Jon T.  Mary Ann and Ken hadn't heard from him in years.  The story I got was that he went out to LA and worked in the movie business.  So I started googling around and came up with a likely resume, emailed him asking him if he was the grandson of Regina B.  He wrote back, yup.  I gave him a lot of information, he hasn't told me much, hey I'm just a stranger writing on the internet.  But he gave me the phone number of Brendan Z, another cousin.