On Monday, January 29th I signed up with FamilySearch Indexing to help with the Indiana Marriages project. My contribution to date has been minor, 6 batches and 70 names indexed so far. My personal goal is to complete a batch a day. The amount of time to complete a batch has varied from 15 to 45 minutes, depending upon whether it's the marriage records or the marriage applications I work on. You never know what county the records will be from and some of the records are definitely more challenging than others. Sometimes it is a matter of interpretation as well as transcription. That's where the arbitration comes in. Two people separately index each of the records and a third person compares them and if there are differences, the arbitrator decides which is most correct.
Shirley Richison Fields, the IGS coordinator for the Indiana Marriages project reported that in the month of January, the first full month, there were 9,117 records indexed and 2,019 were arbitrated. There were 1,063 records done in December (the project began on December 22, 2006) so the total so far is 10,180 records! [bwNote: I'm not sure if this is the number of names that has been submitted or the actual number of records that has been indexed. Each record would have 2 names. The number of records per batch varies.] As of the end of January there were indexers signed up from Canada and Japan as well as 23 of the 50 states.
This would be a great opportunity to give back to the genealogical community. To learn more or to sign up for the Indiana Marriages projects go to the Indiana Genealogical Society website. More information on this and other indexing projects can be found at the FamilySearch Indexing website.
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