My Brief Try-out of Ancestry's World Archives Program ...

Yesterday, I received an e-mail that I could participate in Ancestry's World Archives Indexing program. I originally signed up to be notified because I was curious, and I decided to download the program. After I downloaded the picture, I decided to index an image set.

After downloading the image set, I had to go through three steps to before I could even begin indexing the image. (And I had to do that for every image in the set.) One of the steps was in choosing the layout of the image, and another step was to set the boundaries for the highlighting. Only after those steps was I able to begin indexing.

Personally, I think FamilySearch's indexing program is easier to use and more user-friendly. When it comes to indexing the images, I only have to download it, and I can than start indexing the image. With Ancestry's program, I have to go through other steps before I can even get to the indexing. To be honest, I do not want spend the extra time setting up the image when I can just instantly download an image from another indexing program and start indexing. So, I just decided that using Ancestry's program was not worth my time and uninstalled the program. To be fair, though, Ancestry's program is much different from FamilySearch's program. I just happen to prefer FamilySearch's program over Ancestry's when it comes to indexing images.

Genealogy and History Thoughts Column 16 - My Thoughts on the Ancestry-FamilySearch Partnership

Earlier today, I mentioned my shock at the Ancestry-FamilySearch partnership announcement, and as I promised, I'm posting my thoughts on this announcement.

Not only do I feel shocked, I'm also angry. As a person who has volunteered to index records through FamilySearch, I feel as though I have been cheated and misled. When I decided to help out, the information on the FamilySearch indexing website led me to believe to that the images indexed would be offered online for free. Now, FamilySearch is apparently willing to give transcribed indexes that volunteers like me, had worked on for free to Ancestry.com, a subscription based site. I had not expected this to occur, and I'm upset since I put a lot of time into indexing images since I became a volunteer. Since I began volunteering in April of 2007, I have over 24,000 names/record columns. I realize that may not be a lot to other people, but one has to keep in mind that I am also a full-time college student.

Of course, I mostly feel betrayed because I had hoped that FamilySearch's posting of images online would be a competitor to Ancestry.com. I realize there are other subscription-based genealogy websites out on the internet, but Ancestry appears to pretty much have an almost monopoly of the genealogy market. I was just hoping that competition would lower some of the pricing of subscription prices for fee-based genealogy sites since there are some people who cannot afford to pay for a subscription to Ancestry. I'm a college student, so I truly cannot afford a subscription, and I'm trying to keep the price of my genealogy research fairly low, as much as I can at the moment. Now, I guess gotten my hopes up too much.

As to whether I will continue indexing images, I'm not sure. I like indexing records, and I'm not sure if I just want to quit completely. I think I need to think this over before I make a hasty decision, or for the moment, I could just index other records instead of the 1920 census. I might just do that. So, what do you think? As always, you can leave a comment with your thoughts. All comments are welcome.

Whoa! This Is A Bit Shocking ...

Did I read that right? I just happened to notice an article on Ancestry's blog about the agreement between Ancestry and Familysearch. You can read the announcement here. I did not expect this to happen, and at the moment I'm stunned. I will, though, post my thoughts later today in another post as this one announcement I cannot pass up.

On another note, this is my 619th post in less than a year-and-a-half. Since I started posting in Mid-March 2007, I have posted that many posts!

Anybody Know French, German, Italian or Spanish?

I've happened to notice a couple days ago that FamilySearch Indexing has made some Italian vital records for indexing and some church records for Quebec. There are also church records in German that need to be indexed, and many Spanish records. I thought I would mention this in case someone didn't know about this.

Records Being Indexed At FamilySearch - An Update

In case anyone is wondering which records are currently being indexed at FamilySearch Indexing, here is a list of a few records:

• 1870 U. S. Census
• 1930 Mexico Census
• State censuses of South Dakota and Wisconsin
• Irish bmds
• Philadelphia marriage indexes

As you can see, several records are being indexed. A few of these records have been indexed for a while. You can find out more information here.