In addition to the 350,000 records recently added to the nearly 4 million Australian family records available at FamilySearch.org, another 300,000 records have yet to be indexed.
Australian indexers have been very active in indexing in 2015. Nine thousand Australian indexers joined the “Help Fuel the Find” world-wide indexing project last August. The goal was to have 100,000 indexers working in one week. This goal was nearly reached, with 82,039 indexers participating.
The ultimate goal is to get all the records that can be indexed done and made available. Many more indexers are needed to achieve this goal in a timely fashion.
Carolyn Woolley, who lives in Gosford and has been indexing off and on for the past 30 years, shared her perspective:
“I actually started indexing when I lived in Tasmania. Two or three women used to meet at another woman’s home where she had one film reader and one old carriage typewriter. We read directly from the film in the reader and then typed it up on the typewriter. It was then mailed to the Family History Department in Salt Lake City. Computers and the internet make everything so much easier now.”
“A few years ago I tried one more time to find my great-grandfather’s birth in England. I had tried unsuccessfully many times over the decades, but this time, because of a wonderful indexer somewhere in the world, I found him! The shire in England had had its records digitized by Family Search because an indexer had done the work. Here he was! I want to give someone else that great experience of finding a family member they thought was lost.”
Indexing can be done by just about anyone from age 8 to 80-plus. While many indexers are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many are not. Volunteers from other faiths or no faith are welcome to participate. To learn more about indexing, click here.
For those actively researching their family tree at the present time, the following Australia tutorials in the Learning Centre at FamilySearch.org. will be helpful: (1)The Australia BDM Civil Registration, (2) Transportation to Australia, (3) Using the New South Wales Birth, Death, Marriage Index, and (4) New South Wales Early Church Records 1788-1886.