Now Indexing: Something Not in my Plans

Perhaps this stay-at-home order has inspired countless numbers of would-be indexers to find something productive to do. I'm not sure. All I know is that, now that I've finally gotten around to doing some indexing on FamilySearch.org for this month—face it, I only have one more day left to get it done—I can't find any projects in the queue to be indexed.

Well, there are a few. But not many. At least, not among the U.S. records. And I'm certainly not sure enough of myself to tackle records in foreign languages.

Usually, I zero in on records from areas where my ancestors once settled. I may be a volunteer indexer, but I'm not exactly an altruistic volunteer; I look for record sets which might eventually help my own research cause. Don't be surprised to see me indexing naturalization records for New York City area. Or marriage records in Cook County, Illinois. Maybe even something from the old South.

I seriously doubt any records from Wisconsin would advance my research cause—well, not unless I figure a way to link with my mystery DNA cousins there—but that is what I ended up indexing today. Specifically, I worked on naturalization records.

Granted, the news from FamilySearch.org is that, for the last full month of April, they added 57.2 million newly-indexed records to their collection. That must mean there were a lot of volunteers busy at work transforming those digitized records into searchable material. Perhaps we'll see a similar news report, once we close out the month of May.

That's always good news for any family history researcher—especially those with roots in countries named in the long list of records uploaded at April's end. But I can't recall ever signing on to my FamilySearch account and finding such a dearth of indexing opportunities in my home country as I did today. I'm sure our work is still far from done.