What is indexing? Volunteers around the world devote their time to transcribing records to help families discover more about their ancestors. FamilySearch Marketing Manager, Collin Smith, shares how a record digitized through FamilySearch Indexing helped him learn more about his grandfather.
TRANSCRIPT
A question people ask all the time is "What is indexing?" Well, it's the opportunity to find your ancestors because someone else typed in what they saw in a record. I was able to learn more about my grandfather when I typed in his name in FamilySearch and found a navy record that I didn't know existed. Now, I knew he served in the military, but I didn't know much about his service. So when I typed in his name and a navy record came up matching who he was and where he was born and the age that he should have been when he was in the navy, I knew that was him. Seeing that record brought him to life for me. And for a minute I had to step back and realize that somebody else had made that available to me, that I probably wouldn't have been able to find that had someone not taken a minute to type in information about him that they saw in that record. Now, a record could be anything from a death certificate or a birth certificate, a marriage license, a navy record. People who have time and interest and want to help others are looking at all these records that aren't their own family. They're typing in what they see, the critical information like their names, their dates of birth, where they were when they lived there. And they're making it available so that you and I and everyone else can find those photos of really important documents. So I can find my grandfather's navy record because somebody else, not related to me at all, looked at that image, typed in what they saw, it got databased, and I can put in his last name and see that record. I'm really grateful to the many people who index so that I can find more information about my ancestors and put them in my family tree.
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