Transcribing Data for Family History
Are you part of the movement to transcribe digitized records? Have you found your passion for this new art? Transcribing is an amazing development in the genealogy world, and there are volunteer opportunities all over the web. Transcribing is transforming the whole genealogy community.
Creating interest
Most transcription projects rely on a volunteer base. Because of projects like these, the number of people actively involved in family history work is growing. When the number of people interested grows, the wealth of information and connections made can only grow. This means the likelihood of getting “stuck” somewhere in your research should be diminishing.
My Experience with the 1940 Census
The 1940 Census is out, and you can access it from FamilySearch.org, National Archives, Ancestry.com, and a few other sites. I was just as excited as all of you to see it, and I thought I’d share my experience researching the 1940 Census so far.
Getting Started
I’m a later-in-life child, and as a result, I barely knew my grandparents. I was excited for the 1940 census so I could find my grandparents on it and learn a bit more about them. And, I’ll be honest, I was excited to be the first person in my family to locate my grandparents on the census—it would be like finding a great resource no one had looked at before. I began by trying to locate their correct enumeration districts.
The Genealogy Insider blog really helped me get started; Diane Haddad has spent a lot of time keeping up with which sites have which images uploaded, as well as the indexing progress for each site. I started with FamilySearch since they had Colorado up already, and that is where my maternal grandparents lived in 1940. After locating and poring over images from several enumeration districts, I couldn’t find them. I tried Ancestry.com as well, just to use a different system (their Beta viewer makes it easy to move around the image you’re viewing), but I still haven’t found them.