Marriage Indexing Seminar

Image Source: FamilySearch Blog

The U.S. Marriages Project is a joint initiative between findmypast.com and FamilySearch.org. Its purpose is to save the marriage records from every state in the United States. This service project will create a high quality, searchable database of nearly every marriage recorded in the United States since the early 1800s.

Anyone can participate in this deserving project. Indexers may choose the state(s) they wish to index. Who knows? You might even get the marriage record for your great-grandparents! Visit the FamilySearch Blog Join the Cause! Index Every Marriage Record in the United States for instructions on how to get started.

Also, FamilySearch representatives will be in Arizona soon to show how anyone can learn to do this work.

WHEN: September 30, 2016
WHERE: Mesa FamilySearch Library Training Center, 464 E. 1st Ave. Mesa, AZ
TIME: 7:00–8:30 p.m.

Attendance is free and registration is not required. Save a marriage! Join in this special project.

Free Classes This Week!

The Tucson Family History Center is offering repeat sessions of some of the presentations from "Family History in the 21st Century" in January. If you missed a class or want a refresher, this is your opportunity. The classes being offered the next two weeks are listed below.

Making the Most of Ancestry.com - Thursday, March 28, 11:00 a.m.
British Research: Beyond Parish Records - Saturday, March 30, 11:00 a.m.
FamilySearch Indexing: Serving in Family History from Home or Anywhere - Thursday, April 4, 11:00 a.m.

All classes are one hour in length and are held at the Tucson Family History Center, 500 S. Langley. Map Call the Family History Center at (520)298-0905 for more information or to register. Links to the handouts for both the Ancestry.com and the Indexing classes are on their website and can be accessed by clicking on this link. A complete schedule of classes offered is found here.

Life after the 1940 census

It's over! As of 2:00 p.m. MDT, the final batch of the 1940 U.S. census was arbitrated and submitted for publication. We finished the indexing portion of the census a full two months early. And we helped -- members of the Pima County Genealogy Society indexed 93,474 records and arbitrated 4,321 records. What a great achievement! Read the FamilySearch blog post Nearing the End of the Marathon for the full story. And while you're there, don't forget to pick up your victor's laurel by folowing the link provided in the post.

There are many steps that must be taken to process the indexes, and more were added to increase the quality of this particular index. For those reasons, it will be a few more weeks before the census is fully searchable online at FamilySearch and their partner sites: findmypast.com, and Archives.com. Check out the FamilySearch blog post Paying the Price for more information about the processing. However, if you don't want to wait. Ancestry.com announced today that the 1940 census index is complete on their website and free to search until December 2013. This index was done independantly from the US Census Community Project and may be different. If you don't find the household for which you are seeking on one site, always check the other.

But what if you want to keep helping making records available online to genealogists everywhere? Don't despair. The next community indexing project From Sea to Shining Sea has already begun! This is an exciting new project of Immigration and Naturalization records. These projects are available in the download batch list now with the project name beginning with "US (Community Project)" (you can sort the list by Project Name by clicking on the column header.) Visit the FamilySearch blog post From Sea to Shining Sea for a list of projects under this category, some interesting immigration historical facts, links to FamilySearch wiki articles on Immigration and Naturalization, and links to free research courses on using immigration and naturalization records.

If you haven't participated in the indexing program and have been curious about how it works, visit the same blog post to download and install the program, register for a familysearch account, and start indexing. You can always email our society indexing administrator at sherri85748@gmail.com if you have any questions or need some one-on-one indexing training.

Keep on Indexing!