What is new with Indexing and the 1950 US Census?

Mary Louise Lillian

I am a stake indexing director and will be meeting with other stake consultants and high council and stake presidency soon. I would like to know what's new with Indexing? What progress is there on the 1950 US Census? Will indexers and members be able to help get the 1950 US Census review completed?

I welcome all ideas about encouraging indexing in the stake. The number of English projects has seemed very few recently and the number of Beginning projects really few!!

MinnWisRoots

Mary Louise Lillian,

Not sure what you are referring to when you mention getting the 1950 US Census review completed. If you look at https://www.familysearch.org/getinvolved/1950, you will see, The 1950 U.S. Census community project is now complete. (Emphasis being on the community project.) The FamilySearch 1950 U.S. Census Community project was ended at the beginning of October. The states and U.S. territories that were not completed in that project were outsourced.

The FamilySearch 1950 US Census Record Improvement Project (mentioned near the end of the Census Community project and in previous postings by Janell Vasquez and myself) is now scheduled to start in January 2023. Like the Census Community project, this project won't be available from the indexing menu since it involves different software and, in this case, a separate correction tool. It is geared to help fix some of the problems they were unable to fix in the original software (don't know exactly what these are at this time). FS is anticipating it to be an Intermediate to Advanced level project, leaning more to Advanced, and will be providing mentors to help with the software. Thus, they have made it a closed group project available only to those who previously signed up by email.

[Note: I am a volunteer and not affiliated with FamilySearch. I am, however, signed up for the 1950 US Census Record Improvement project, and am reporting information that is either available from FamilySearch on their website or has been emailed to me from FamilySearch about this upcoming project.

Mary Louise Lillian

Thanks for this information. I, too, signed up to help but have not been receiving emails.

It is my impression that Indexing will continue to have fewer English projects because records are being indexed by AI more now. I also suspect that FamilySearch will rely on researchers to edit records as they find them and make corrections to the AI that way.