2024 September President’s Letter
Here in Arizona, our hot summer weather will still be with us for another month or two. Since it is too hot to go outside to do gardening, play golf, or pickleball or even take nice walks, I have a proposal I’d like to share with you.
Genealogy requires research, right? Since we’re sitting in our air-conditioned homes, why not work on a special project that will help ALL genealogy enthusiasts? As we know, the majority of records we would like to have access to are not currently online or are not indexed and/or easily searchable. But where are the records we want to find without traveling to local courthouses, historical societies, state libraries, etc.?
The National Archives is a repository of our nation’s history and record keeper. Per their website, archives.gov, the following numbers describe their holdings:
Size of permanent archival holdings:
- 13.5 billion pieces of paper
- More than 725,000 artifacts
- More than 450 million feet of film, or about 85,302 miles (enough to circle the earth almost 3.4 times)
- 41 million photographs
- 40 million aerial images
- 10 million maps, charts, and architectural/ engineering drawings
- More than 33 billion electronic records (837 terabytes)
There is a program called CITIZEN ARCHIVIST where we can transcribe and tag records to make them more accessible for searching with the catalog. Many of the documents that have been digitized are handwritten notes, letters and OCR (optical character recognition) is not always accurate. Having a manual transcription is normally going to be much more accurate.
You can sign up for this program very easily on the archives.gov website. The link is https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/register-and-get-started. Again, the program is called Citizen Archivist. When you have some spare time, you can log on and transcribe as much or as little as your time allows. This is a great crowd-sourcing program for us to get involved like when we helped index the 1940 and 1950 census records. You can choose what records you want to work on as there are many document sets that you will find interesting to see.
Happy transcribing…
Katie Gertz
FHSA President
