Genealogy, I Am Doing It!

In LDS church services, there are three hourish block meetings. This generally starts with Sacrament Meeting, where we partake of the sacrament and have talks given by members of the congregation. Then there is Sunday School. Then the men and women split up into Priesthood and Relief Society meetings. But not always in this order. Our ward does it backwards, which makes for a fun change.

Point being Sunday School. In our ward there is a choice of three classes to attend, Gospel Doctrine, Marriage and Family (as we are a married student ward and there are enough couples who have been married less than six months to fill this class) and Family History. Sunday before last the teacher was offering cookies to get more people to come in, so my husband and I accepted the bribe and had our first lesson about doing family history online. It was really interesting stuff! So we went yesterday too. Besides, it gives us an excuse to take a laptop to church... 

So now I'm all set up on a few different family history websites that the church sponsors, ready to do some work! Most of my own family history has already been done by other members of my extended family, but I noticed that there's a significant chunk missing from one of the newer systems that needs to get added. It all exists, I'll just have the opportunity to transfer it over. Once that's done though, I'll be doing something called indexing. If I understand it correctly, people all over the world photocopy all kinds of old documents like censuses and birth certificates, and those end up on FamilySearch.org. Then you open one of those handwritten documents, and put all the information into a form that is now searchable on the internet. Pretty cool stuff right? 

It really is a great experience to do service. I tend to get really caught up in just making sure I have what I want/need. I've been volunteering at the local library, dusting shelves once a week for almost two months. It kinda gave me a taste for service, and now I'm excited to do more. Besides, if you can call derping around on your computer for a few minutes service, count me in.