Census Indexing Project in Cooperation with the Family History Library

Dear Nuestros Ranchos Members:

This afternoon, Joseph, Mickey and I had a conference call with Ruth Schirmacher and Lynn Turner of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City where they proposed that Nuestros Ranchos serve as the pilot group to use Family Search's new digital online indexing technology to index Latin American records.

As most of you are probably aware, Family Search has already taken on indexing the entirety of the surviving 1930 Mexico Census. If you have not yet done so, I suggest you go to:

http://www.familysearchindexing.org

and sign up as a volunteer, download the software and try out the indexing software. You can choose to specifically work on the Aguascalientes portion of the 1930 Mexico census (which is now being indexed) or any other one of the indexing projects currently being worked on.

The proposal made to Nuestros Ranchos is for the indexing of earlier censuses from our region (Jalisco, Zacatecas and Aguascalientes). What this would require would be getting a core of people from the group who are experienced in extracting Mexican records to serve as arbitrators and do quality control and to recruit a larger group of volunteers from within the group and from outside of it who would be willing to do the indexing.

The first step is to identify the censuses that we would want to index. The only prerequisite is that the census be filmed in the Family History Library's collection. I personally believe that colonial era censuses would be the most useful, so we would like to identify any and all films that include censuses from our three states, especially those from before 1820. Please let us know of any films from your towns that you know of, especially if they are older censuses. Many are listed in the catalog with the subject as "Census", "Padron" or "Padrones" but many others are simply listed under parroquial records or are included in a film with other records (baptisms, marriages, etc).

Also, if you have ever used a colonial era census film or would like to participate as an arbitrator to do quality control, please let us know.

I think this is a great opportunity for each of us to contribute to genealogy research from our region. The indexes will be made available for searching to the general public online as will the images of the census films. By agreeing to provide volunteers for this project, we get the digitization and online availabilty of these census films prioritized. I personally am very excited about the project and flattered that the Family History Library chose Nuestros Ranchos to be the pilot group. I hope you can all share in this excitement.