Indexers

One of the limitations of genealogy records on the internet is that it takes humans to be able to read the old documents and put them in a format that the computer will understand. One of the large tasks that Genealogy world faces when it comes to the internet is having enough qualified indexers to format the documents so they can be used on the internet.

Both Ancestry and Family Search depend on a army of indexers to read the microfilm scans of documents and put it in the format that computers can read. At last count Family Search was adding close to 5 million individual records per week. All of us can help in this process. The process is easy. Once you have indexed the document two other people index the same documents. When the document has been indexed by three different people then the results are sent to a arbitrator. This person is a skilled indexer and above average at reading hand writing. This process has resulted in much more accurate databases on the internet.

Give it a try. When we all help it allows the records to get on the Internet much faster. We have not even scratched the surface with records that need to be done.