Indexing Experience

Indexing is a process in which individuals are able to write out the information of record collection in a more advance program where it will be easier for other to search and find individuals around the World.  Records around the world are put into digital copies and they are separated into batches. The indexer than can choose which batch they want to complete. They copy the information given into a selective section of the form that has been downloaded.

Indexing is important because it makes it easier for individuals to access the information of their relatives. It is faster to search for family information and it is an essential part of family history as individuals search for their relatives throughout the world. With out this step it would be hard for individuals to look through information that has many images and that it is not available to them.

I was able to complete a little over five hours of indexing. I started by doing the U.S.  Puerto Rico Censo Federal de 1940 and Puerto Rico WWII Draft registration cards. I was able to 308 batches for that. I also dis the U.S, New York, WWi Draft Registration cards. I was able to do 19 of those. Which made it a total of 317 batches.

I decided to do Puerto Rico because I know Spanish and I thought that it would be easier for me to do that rather than someone that doesn’t know Spanish. I also decided to do New York Because I wanted to see the different screenshots that they had for different areas around the world.

At first it was hard to get use to it. I was very cautious of everything that I was doing. I would Google residences, names, last names, to make sure that they were spell correctly. As I got more used to the program it went by faster. When I had trouble reading a name under the tools bar of the program I was able to see the different handwriting tools. That really helped.  I didn’t have any bad batches. I was able to read most of them.

When I looked at my arbitrators result it said that there is no arbitrator data available yet. I hope that it will appear soon so I can learn the things that I need to improve on.

I was able to learn so much. As I worked on my records I was able to noticed a pattern with last names. Especially because in the Spanish culture we have two last names.  I came across the name of Josefa often as I was indexing. I’ve only known one Josefa. It was interesting to see the popular names during those times.