Resources at Our Fingertips

Won't it be nice when the Internet makes all sources available to us instantaneously and at no cost? Of course this is only a dream. There will never be a time when all genealogical resources are available online, and many databases still require a fee. But many, many resources are coming online constantly. For this reason, web searches should be conducted regularly, like every six months, for the same terms and keywords that you have searched exhaustively in the past.

And you can help hasten the day when more resources are available by participating in the indexing of the LDS Genealogical Collection. Go to www.familysearchindexing.org and sign up. Your efforts will be combined with the efforts of hundreds of thousands of other indexers (really!) who are working to make a master index of all the names on all the microfilms (fast becoming digital images) in the LDS collection. Hundreds of millions of records have already been indexed. More are more foreign sources are being indexed. When it is all done, you will be able to search for an ancestor, discover that information is available from a birth record, a marriage record, a death record, a census record--or all of these--and click on the link to see the image of the record. It's already in the beta testing. Take a sneak peak at what's in the works at the experimental site and do a record search there.