Dobson can demonstrate, online, just how easy it is to volunteer. Last week, in his office in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, Dobson, on his laptop, went to www.familysearchindexing.org and called up a registry. There were a half-dozen registries listed on the Web site — including Georgia death certificates from 1919-1927 and a federal census from New York State from 1900. (As each of these registries is transcribed, new registries will appear on the Web site.)

Dobson clicked on a registry and a handwritten census record popped onto his screen, along with a blank form on which he was to type the handwritten names and dates.

The handwritten record on his screen featured a family named Johnson, and the mother's first name seemed to be spelled "Allice," and her son's name looked to be "Clarience." Because these are not traditional spellings for "Alice" and "Clarence," when Dobson typed in those names, they came up with a note indicating he needed to double-check the handwritten records. This he did. To him, the names still looked like "Allice" and "Clarience," so that's how he left them when he finished transcribing the document.

Dobson explains that there is an invisible double-check built into the system. Each handwritten record will come up twice, at random, and be typed in twice, by two different volunteers. Any discrepancies between the two forms will alert a third person, an arbitrator, who is a more experienced genealogist. The arbitrator looks at the original record and makes a final decision on the name or date or geographical location in question.

In order to make volunteering easy and to let people feel they've accomplished something, the Family Search Indexing project assigns each volunteer only as many names as can be typed up in about 30 or 40 minutes. If your children are little, Dobson notes, you could put them down for a nap and do your volunteering by the time they wake up.

Dobson has three goals for his portion of this project. For one thing, he hopes to get more volunteers. Already genealogy groups from other parts of the country, people outside the LDS Church, have enthusiastically taken on the project. (The Family Search Indexing site explains how to go about becoming a volunteer.)

Dobson also hopes to broaden the participation. He pictures families gathered around the computer, having fun as they research.

And he believes, as genealogy becomes accessible, more young people will be drawn into the hobby. A recent survey, taken within the Family History Library system found that 35 percent of those who do family history are in the 41- to 60-year-old age group, and about 33 percent of those who do family history have little or no experience.

Genealogy is no longer just for retired people. And you don't have to know very much at all in order to volunteer, Dobson adds.

There is, of course, a certain irony to Dobson's efforts to enlist more teenagers in this genealogy revolution, he notes. Because they were raised to Google, to find a wealth of information by typing in a name, teenagers don't see this project as being quite as revolutionary as he does.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com