I've found a very small way to help back at church

I have something legitimate to do on the computer at long last! lol A while back someone in Relief Society mentioned being able to do some type of extraction work while at home. That appealed to me and I meant to get more info on it and forgot about it. Then a friend on an internet bulletin board mentioned doing this and had the website. I looked it up and got all excited again.

What it is is volunteers extracting family history information from digital images of historical documents to create indexes that assist everyone in finding their ancestors. Right now I'm kind of been "assigned" to the Illinois 1900 federal census. It's a page from the census with 50 names and I take the information and put it in the computer. It' easy data entry work but for me it's kind of exciting and sad too. These people were probably standing in front of this person writing their information down and over 100 years later I'm taking their info and putting it in the computer for future geneology work to be done. You can see the occupations they held, how many family members they had, etc. The saddest part was seeing the two categories called Mother of how many children and the how many living children. They are rarely the same number. Most often it's total number of children will have 5 and the living children are 3. So everytime I see the numbers the same, I get happy and feel good for the mother. I can't imagine having to deal with the death of my children for anything.

What's great is that it's not just limited to church members. Everyone who is interested can do it. They prefer you have a broadband connection and they give you a little lesson on how to do it all so you are prepared and know what to look for. This stuff just gives me chills and excites me!! The first night I did at least 150 names and was up till after 1am. For anyone who is interested, please go to this website and help someone find their ancestors. You won't be sorry!!
www.familysearchindexing.org