FamilySearch Indexing Daily Stats

     Since 8pm est yesterday, I've indexed 560 names and arbitrated 760 names, all from the 1940 census.  As a whole, 5,412,976 names have been indexed and 2,276,204 have been arbitrated.

     The goal of 5 million names was reached 14 hours into the challenge. I'm thinking that we could actually reach 10 million names if everyone keeps up the hard work.

     But those number I mentioned above, you might wonder where those came from? FamilySearch is listing occasional updates on Facebook and Twitter, but you don't need to wait for them to know the numbers. You can check them out any time at https://indexing.familysearch.org/rss?listType=todaypage. And change "todaypage" to "yesterdaypage" to see the previous day's stats.  For comparison, yesterday 2.3 million names were indexed in a 24 hour period, versus the 5.4 million so far today (17 hours).

    Congrats and keep up the good work folks (and feel free to index some Georgia and South Carolina 1940 Census records!)

FamilySearch Indexing, You Confuse Me

I've been trying to be more active indexing with FamilySearch Indexing, especially since The Georgia Archive is asking for help indexing their 1928-29 death certificates. I always find that it's easier to transcribe local documents, because you're more familiar with the names of cities and popular family names.

But, FamilySearch Indexing is confusing me. I'll go along for a while, requesting a batch of GA death certificates just fine. The only problem is that I can only download one batch at a time. Then, all of a sudden, GA death certs aren't listed as a project. As I switch views between "preferred projects" and "all projects," I notice that the list changes. Every time I switch, I see different projects, with different projects being given the "highest priority" tag. What's going on? Finally, the GA death certs re-apear. Yay! But when I try to download a batch, I'm told that there are no batches available. Grr.... How are batches not available when it's a high priority!?

So what I'm wondering is: is this a glitch or is this on purpose to keep indexers from staying with one project?

Here are some screen shots, in order, of what I saw when looking at my batch choices.

He lived -31 Years

I'm transcribing death certificates for FamilySearchIndexing right now. The put out a new project of 1930s Georgia death certs. They haven't had a GA project in a long time, so I hopped at the chance to help with this one.

So, I'm transcribing. Some are easy to read, some are hard to read. Some are in cursive, some in print and others typed. I come across one for Francis Gallo. This one's interesting! He's from Italy and died at "The Little Sister of the Poor," and was born in May 1961. Wait... these are all 1930 deaths! Checking death date.... yup, 1930! This man lived negative 31 years! It's a miracle! Or, I guess it's a typo... but a miracle sounds like more fun.