I am an occasional indexer for FamilySearch, about which I have written before. There is an enormous number of projects to be indexed from all over the world. You can see the current list here.

One of the projects currently available for indexing is the Sydney Cemetery Inscriptions, a collection of index cards for cemeteries including Rookwood, the largest cemetery in Sydney and probably Australia. Name, age, date of death and cemetery name is the minimum information that I have so far seen, although there is capacity for birth date,  parents’ names and spouse’s name.

FamilySearch indexing is the easiest to use indexing software I’ve ever seen. The screen is split between a digital image of the document being indexed and the form to be filled in. Many fields give a list of common names, placenames, etc, which help enormously if the entry is hard to read. There is a lot of help available, on the screen and on the website. The biggest advantage is that each batch is indexed twice, with a third person to adjudicate if there are any discrepancies, so you do not have the pressure of getting it perfect.

A batch consists of a variable number of entries to be indexed, depending on the document. These cemetery batches only have 12 or 15 cards to a batch that I have seen so far, so you can whip through one quickly. I used to index Irish Civil Registration indexes and they had 375 names to a page!

The sooner we get this indexed the sooner it will be available to all of us. For more information or to sign up click here.

I am an occasional indexer for FamilySearch Indexing. This ground-breaking project is digitising millions of rolls of microfilm, and asking the rest of us to help them index it all. The results are made available to everyone for free. It’s an enormous job and will take many years, and the more of us that get involved and start indexing the quicker it will be.

They have just announced to indexers that they will soon be starting on Australian records.

We are excited to announce that the Australia, Bounty Immigrants, 1824-1842 project and the Australia, New South Wales-Newspaper Cuttings project, which may be of interest to you, will soon be released.

You can find the indexing project here. I can guarantee I will become a more frequent indexer than I have been in the past.