Now Indexing: Something to Match my Goals

While flitting about social media the other day, I happened to spot a tweet by genetic genealogist Shannon Christmas recommending that FamilySearch indexers volunteer to help the Restore the Ancestors 2019 Project.

Of course, then I had to ask, "So, what's the Restore the Ancestors 2019 Project?"

I'm sure you're asking that, too.

As it turns out, the project is a handy partner project to what I'm trying to do with my own King Stockton project: restore hidden clues about family to help descendants of former enslaved persons penetrate that family history brick wall and reach back prior to the Civil War for records of their ancestors.

Sponsored, along with FamilySearch and Black ProGenLive, by the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum, this online effort is calling for all volunteers willing to help by doing the data entry necessary to make already-digitized records searchable. The records selected for indexing are those which will be of most help to researchers pursuing their African-American roots. In many cases, they are documents obtained from southern counties in which few antebellum records still exist.

The project's website explains, in simple terms, how an interested volunteer can sign up to help, and what the project's first record set targets are. Since I'm already an indexing volunteer at FamilySearch, I requested to join the Restore the Ancestors 2019 project right away, and waited for the administrative go-ahead. Within hours, I was admitted to the group, and started my first indexing batch.

The first project selection is the marriage record set of Colleton County, South Carolina. While there are couples married there from all ethnicities—and thus, all records are indexed for this project, regardless of ethnic origin—the project managers feel that this set, completed, will greatly assist those researching their African-American roots in that region.

The records were easy to read—although the sets I did had images needing to be rotated ninety degrees—and I breezed through two sets with hardly a problem at all, despite the usual challenges of reading handwritten documents. Since the amount of time required to do just one set is minimal, it's a task which can easily be sandwiched in during breaks in the day.

Of course, with the 110 members—and counting—who are also working on this project, I suspect this record set will be dispatched to the "done" box in no time at all. There are doubtless others the project managers have already selected for completion. And what a sense of accomplishment to see those numbers on the graph chart the group's progress!

As King Stockton's ancestors likely did not come from South Carolina, it's not like this project will answer my direct research needs. Then, again, I don't really know; after all, Colleton County is not that far away from the Georgia coast location of the Tison plantation where King Stockton's mother Hester was once enslaved. Whether participation in this project leads to a personal research breakthrough or not, it's a good feeling to know that these crowdsourced efforts to make more records searchable will someday spill over into a region or record set that might provide an answer that I am searching for.