Geneology, I am Doing It!

Yes, I know that they changed the words in the Children's Hymnbook to "Family history, I am doing it," but I still like the original words.
So, I've been thinking lately about how blessed I am right now in my life. I have a great job, a wonderful husband, a lovely home, and great friends and family. I'm also blessed with a lot of free time in the evenings and on weekends. So I decided that I wanted to give something back, to find a way to serve.
One thing that came to mind was family history. I felt compelled to be more active in helping with family history. I want to combine the training I received from the Family History class I took at BYU with the time that I've been blessed with. So this past week I started indexing records on-line.
You go to FamilySearch.org (there's a link to it from the lds.org website) and there's a tab at the top of the page for Indexing Records. If you've never done it before, they have some tutorials on-line, as well as help tabs while you're doing it.
I've done this off and on in the past, and I'll warn you that it can be addicting. But that's a good thing! As I was picking it up again, I found that I was a little worried that I might index something incorrectly. Some of the handwriting is hard to read, and it can be difficult to make out what the record is saying. But you just do your best and type it as you see it - they actually have two people index every record. Then, if there are any discrepencies, a third person checks both transcriptions and the original record and determines what it should say. This relieved my worries that I would type in a name incorrectly and make it difficult for someone who is trying to find their ancestor.
After the indexing has been cross-checked and corrected (if necessary), they post the information for free on FamilySearch.org so that anyone can have access to it.
I highly encourage everyone to give indexing a try. It's very user friendly. It doesn't take a lot of time- it usally takes me about 20-30 minutes to do one record. And you don't have to sit down and do a batch all at once - you can download it to your computer and work on it when you have time.