A family history overhaul

"We're trying to make the information much more accessible and also much more meaningful," Anderson said. "The Web has made us all a little attention-challenged, yet we all flock to it. All that we're doing here with online programs and databases puts us right at the doorstep of a mountain of significant change."

The church is currently working with thousands of volunteers worldwide to help index the digitized records — many of them through state and local genealogical societies. Public access to selected records that have been both digitized and indexed is anticipated "fairly soon — definitely by next year," he said.

Family History communications and planning manager Paul Nauta said the indexing technology is "coming along nicely" at this point, and managers will begin testing the indexing internally through church groups and with selected genealogical societies nationally who have volunteers now working to index records that their memberships find valuable.

The project, dubbed "FamilySearch Indexing," is drawing growing interest from volunteers in a variety of areas. A demonstration of the new technology will be featured at the Ogden Regional Family History Conference Oct. 6-7 at the Eccles Conference Center during a presentation called "Opening the Granite Mountain Vault." (For information, see www.myancestorsfound.com/NorthUtah/highlights.htm)

Curt Witcher with the Indiana Genealogical Society is one of two people overseeing volunteers who are indexing all Indiana marriage records from 1820 to 1957 for the digitized images the LDS Church has. He heard about the indexing project at a national conference and asked his society to participate.

Volunteers range from beginners to experienced researchers, he said, because the workload has been processed into manageable bits — meaning volunteers can spend only 30 minutes at any one time and feel a sense of accomplishment.

He said it's difficult to estimate how long it will take to index millions of records covering a 150 year span, but he's estimating it will be 36 months. As enthusiasm builds, "it wouldn't surprise me if it took less than half that time," he said.

Errors are bound to occur, but should be caught because the system is designed so every record is in entered twice — by two different people working independently of each other. If one record disagrees with the other, an arbitrator will decide which one is correct.