A new kind of "March Madness"

My Ward is doing an indexing competition during the month of March.
Indexing. Yeah.
Madness, indeed!

For those of you who might not be familiar with indexing, you go through old records (birth records, death records, marriage records, war records, census records... you get the picture) and type out the information and upload it to this large data base so that the information is available for everyone to see and use. It is a key component in genealogy and family history work. If you ever want to try it out yourself, you can go to this website, get an account, and start helping out the greater good!

Here's an example of a census record... and by the way, the 1940 census records get released in less than a month! You could help record stuff like this!

Warning... it can be potentially difficult, yet rewarding.

In any case, I think that indexing is fun. And extremely addicting. Once I start a batch, I just want to keep going with it. Last night, I started doing a batch of Texas Death records, and I was going to stop at the halfway point, but I just kept telling myself "one more name...... now just one more...... and one more....."

Yeah.

And since it's a competition, we're going mad! Not really, but we were having an "indexing party" this evening. There was 12 of us sitting here typing out names. The internet was going rather slow, thanks to all the people sitting in my apartment using our router. But it was still fun to sit with everyone and save the vital information of ancestors while munching on fish crackers and chex mix.

Actually, most of the people - aka, all of the boys - that were indexing were getting frustrated with it. Maybe I'm just one of those rare gems that actually finds this enjoyable. But that's good, right? Somebody's got to index, so why not somebody like me??!?

Plus, I tend to get competitive with things like this. We are competing within our FHE groups, so the group that gets the most indexing points by the end of the month wins a prize. And the couple individuals who index the most also get a prize. And so it goes without saying that I want my group to win and I want to win an individual prize. Well, that's me... I'm not competitive about sports and board games, but when it comes to competitions like this, I go all out.

Plus, it just feels good to be a helping hand :)