Are you still exploring the 1950 US Census? I am and I am sure I’m not the only one, right? There are many family members I still want to look up in it! I purposely waited until the indexing and review was complete via the FamilySearch initiative and it’s also fun to see those hints popping up at Ancestry.
Well – here is some news that I never got around to sharing. For the FamilySearch review & indexing project, I organized a group for the Academy of Legacy Leaders (my Facebook group) so that our combined stats could be tracked and boy, were we busy.
Our Academy of Legacy Leaders group of 66 volunteers made 325,342 total corrections, including 288,567 name corrections. and of all the “society groups” that were formed to do indexing, we ranked #3! Out of the more than 9,000 groups total (society or not), we ranked #12. How cool is that!
What a fun project to be part of. When the 1940 US Census came out in 2012, I also coordinated a group (for the TNGenWeb Project) and we ranked in the top 10 that time also.
In fact, indexing is something I am highly passionate about. When I graduated from my library science program, my Master’s project was the creation of a magazine index. Back in the early 2000s when cross-stitching was my hobby of choice, I created an index to magazine cross-stitch patterns.
Most recently, I started jointly coordinating a newspaper indexing project for the TNGenWeb of names and organizations from historical Tennessee newspapers. We are about a year into the project and our most recent milestone is that our volunteer group has indexed more than 18,000 names/organizations so far!. I could not be happier nor more thankful for that volunteer community.
If you are interested in joining us and helping, you can join our Facebook group to learn more. Even if Tennessee is not your personal state of interest, I welcome you to still check us out because this is a project I desire to help extend to other states too.
“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” – Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”
Indexing is just good for the soul and is my way of giving back to the genealogy community. I’ve shared this project at the past two RootsTech conferences as part of FamilySearch’s “Let’s Do Good” project presentations and I enjoyed those opportunities to spread our mission. The stories we are going to help others’ uncover via this historical newspaper indexing project, gives me goosebumps of anticipation. I invite you to join us for the ride!