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SALT LAKE CITY — After a worldwide, weeklong effort to index records through FamilySearch, participants increased 89 percent of the non-English indexing activity.
Volunteers who index are essentially transcribing digitized genealogical records collected by the world's largest genealogy organization, FamilySearch, so people can find their ancestors.
From Aug. 7 to 14, FamilySearch's Worldwide Indexing Event saw more than 82,000 volunteers who helped "Fuel the Find" by indexing more than 12.2 million records and producing 2.3 million arbitrated records, according to FamilySearch.
These records added to the existing records that are freely searchable at FamilySearch. In an effort to increase its international records, FamilySearch looked for volunteers who could index in various languages, specifically French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
Because most indexing volunteers are English speakers, FamilySearch has 20 times the English records than it does all other languages combined.
Global volunteers processed more than 2,183,212 non-English records, with 1,380,684 Spanish records, 147,568 in Portuguese, 226,734 in French, and 116,835 Italian records.
If volunteers will keep up this rate of non-English indexing and arbitration, we'll soon see people everywhere experiencing the same success in finding their ancestors that English-language researchers enjoy.
–Courtney Connolly, FamilySearch digital marketing manager
"We are thrilled with the number of people who are fluent in a non-English language who accepted the challenge to index records in that language," Courtney Connolly, FamilySearch digital marketing manager said in a statement. "If volunteers will keep up this rate of non-English indexing and arbitration, we'll soon see people everywhere experiencing the same success in finding their ancestors that English-language researchers enjoy."
According to FamilySearch, the name #FuelTheFind comes from how indexing helps people find their family information from these online records. They compare indexed records to fuel that powers FamilySearch and other genealogical search engines so people can connect to their missing ancestors.
"There is a huge and growing need for English speakers who are fluent in a second language, and native speakers of non-English languages, to learn how to index. Tens of thousands of new volunteers are needed to keep up with the opportunity to index the world's records," Connolly said in a statement.
FamilySearch thanks the Worldwide Indexing Event volunteers and encourages any interested parties to participate in indexing.
To learn more about indexing, watch this video.
