Genealogy Volunteer Opportunities

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Permalink Reply by Sue Fitzpatrick on July 9, 2009 at 2:14pm

I've been doing entres for Family Search (www.familysearchindexing.com). I've got aobut 1400 items since mid May entered.

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Permalink Reply by Martha J. Berryman on July 9, 2009 at 3:25pm

There are so many ways to volunteer. I think you covered most of the basics Tami. I just wanted to break down the library volunteer one a bit and make a comment on the websites. Helping out in the library can be either a local family history center or a public library. Also don't forget about your local, county, and state historical and genealogical societies. A lot of these groups are heavily involved in preservation projects and volunteers are highly sought after. As for websites, both RAOGK and Books We Own are awesome. Don't forget about some of the smaller websites you can volunteer to do lookups on. The best example I can think of are the county or state sites on the usgenweb.

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Permalink Reply by Martha J. Berryman on July 9, 2009 at 3:35pm

I almost forgot. There are also some groups that are looking for volunteers to help with online projects. The well known one is the indexing project through familysearch. But there are a few others you may come across. A few years ago I was bored and googled online genealogy volunteers. I came across the TAG group and Ron Filion over at sfgenealogy.com. He was scanning in images of various documents (deeds, city directories, etc.) and the group would extract the information and this was one way they were making information available online. The TAG group is no longer functioning but they are currently working on a mortuary record project over there. It's almost complete but I know they could use more help. Another project I helped out on was the Missouri Archives death record index. They would send you a copy of the index and you would input it into a spreadsheet and send it back. Easy enough and because of this type of project, we now have this wonderful index online and they have attached the images for the actual death certificates to these indexed names. It's been a great benefit to my research and I'm glad I was able to help out. Simple ways to volunteer that can make a huge difference. One last thing, sorry if I'm starting to ramble. You can always volunteer or "donate" what information you have to online archives. This not only helps to preserve that information in a way but also makes the information available to others. I've done this for many years on the usgenweb sites and it's been a good experience.

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Permalink Reply by tami osmer glatz on July 9, 2009 at 4:16pm

That reminds me -- I totally forgot to include Find-A-Grave as a volunteer activity. And I just added 300 pics to one cemetery this summer! I have found so many relatives' tombstone photos that others have kindly contributed, I always photo as many tombstones as I can whenever I'm in a cemetery, whether they're related or not, to return the favor to someone else.

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