Last weekend, I went to a meeting to learn more about indexing and the 1940 Census, which is about to be released in 8 days, on April 2. Familysearch is looking for lots of volunteers, because they'd like to have the census fully indexed and available by the end of this year. That's a major accomplishment! I can't remember the exact source now, but it was from an earlier meeting I went to, where I was told that it took 18 years to index the 1880 census and 18 months to index the 1930 Census. There was a lot more people to index in 1930! But there were also a lot more volunteers, and it was done through digital means and the internet. All records will be free and on the familysearch website. Here is the link to the page on familysearch about indexing:
https://www.familysearch.org/volunteer/indexing
Some statistics I wrote down in class:
- In 2010, 185 million records were indexed by familysearch volunteers. (People like you and me)
- 500,000 records were digitized per day
- about 60 mil records per year are being digitized at the rate people are indexing right now
In 1940, Alfreda, Jadwiga, Bronislaw, and Jozef left the country and this part of our family is in Poland, except Bronislaw. (Invasion of Poland was 1939) Adam Sanetra has already died. All of Adam's children that we know of are married and starting to have children, except Jadwiga. Paul and Ervin know about eachother and stayed close, but they couldn't find anyone else in their family. They kept writing letters looking for Stanley, Bronislawa, Bronislaw, Jozef, and their father (not knowing he had died or left the country, or remarried). We have a better chance of finding Stanley and Bronislawa on the 1940 census, because it's one more record to search. As soon as the records are searchable, which is done by indexing records. Can't wait for another database to try to find more family!
