There’s a big worldwide event coming up this summer– No, I’m not talking about the Olympics. It’s the FamilySearch Worldwide Indexing Event scheduled for July 15-17 and we want YOU to be one of the at least 72,000 volunteers who will turn hand-written records into searchable online entries.
I served an LDS mission to Portgual from 2000-2001. For about 2 months I lived in a place called Paço de Arcos, not far from Lisbon. As part of our weekly schedule, we did service at our local church building, looking at old birth records on microfilm.
It was quite the experience trying to decipher old handwriting, in another language! But we learned about how they used to write accents, cedilhas, how everyone has at least 4 or 5 names, and to save space, many of those names are abbreviated! But it was really cool and fun to do, and I’m pretty sure we got some of them right.
Now, you can do it right from your home computer, and you can find records in English to do 🙂 If you’re interested, visit this link (familysearch.org) to get more details, download the required software, and sign up for the event.
Official reporting on the event:
From July 15-17, FamilySearch International will sponsor the third annual “Worldwide Indexing Event,” bringing 72,000 people from around the globe together online during a 72-hour event to save the world’s records by making them searchable to the public.
