Family history, I am doing it

Well, sorta.  I'm not exactly doing my own family history, but I am helping others do theirs.  Indexing.  Heard of it?  Elder Bednar talked about it a conference or two back, which is when I first became curious.  Then I heard a presentation on it at a stake leadership training and knew this was something I needed to check out.  The Spirit told me loud and clear. And yet I didn't.  A month passed, I started to forget, I got lazy.  Elder Scott talked about it in October conference and I felt that same feeling I did at the stake meeting: "You need to do this.  Now." 

This post is a sad peek into my mad procrastination skills, because you'd think hearing an apostle of the Lord tell me something I'd already felt prompted to do would be impetus enough to act.  But no.  I still managed to rationalize that I had too much to do in October to add some weird family history thing to my daily to-do list.  Seriously, what is wrong with me?

Finally, after a presentation in our ward a few weeks ago, the same exact presentation I'd heard a few months before, I realized I'd run out of excuses.  I went home that night, hopped onto familysearch.com for the first time in my life--I know, I know, what kind of Mormon homemaker am I?--and started indexing.  So easy, people.  You look at old documents, mostly from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, and transcribe or decipher the handwritten script.  You record names from those documents to help all those family history decectives out there who are trying to find their ancestors.

Sounds incredibly boring, I know.  And some of the documents really are just that--boring.  But then you hit a ship's log from the S. S. Aquitania that came from England to Massachussetts in the 1920's, and suddenly you're imagining what the lives of these families that boarded and rode this ship were like.  Or you're going through soldier cards from WWI and thinking about the sacrifice these young men and women made to serve their country.  Or your transported to Ghana for some census records, or to Puerto Rico for baptismal records. It's actually quite fascinating.  

I love that it doesn't require absolute concentration, ether. It's one of those things you can do while you watch TV, and rather than feel like you just wasted an hour of your life online doing what you typically do during shows at night, you feel like you've actually been a little productive. You feel like you've done something worthwhile during downtime. Pretty cool.

Our stake has a goal of indexing 500,000 names by the end of the year, and as of the first Sunday in November only half that goal had been met. But I've been surprised how quickly it goes. Like I said, I've only been at it for a few weeks, and certainly not every day, but just from those ten times or so I've done over a thousand. So I just have to do that two-hundred and forty-nine more times, and the goal will be met! Just kidding. (If you're in my stake, help me out) I do like feeling like I'm at least on the path to someday doing my own family history. If nothing else, I'm helping do somebody's family history. :)