How to Start Indexing on FamilySearch

Indexing is the most flexible service opportunity I’ve found in the Church — no schedule, no calling, no committee, and a batch of old census records fits neatly between breakfast and the kids waking up. Here’s what it actually is, why it matters more than it feels like it should, and exactly how to do your first batch this week.

Updated August 2026 · 13 min read

A few years ago, our ward’s temple and family history consultant stood up in fifth-Sunday meeting and said something that changed how I serve: “Some of you can’t attend the temple as often as you’d like right now. Some of you have small children, health limitations, or night jobs. Indexing is the temple-adjacent service that fits inside whatever life you actually have.” I was in one of those seasons — three kids under seven, a commute that ate my evenings, and a temple recommend I wasn’t using nearly enough. I went home and signed up that night, half expecting it to be one more good intention that died by February. It didn’t. It’s still the steadiest service habit I have.

What surprised me most was how small the entry fee is. There is no special software to install, no training meeting to attend, no approval from anyone. A free FamilySearch account, a web browser, and about ten minutes will get you through your first real batch of records. And unlike a lot of service that asks for a big block of time on a specific day, indexing shrinks and stretches to fit the life you bring to it — one batch over breakfast, three batches on a quiet Sunday afternoon, nothing at all during a hard month, and no one is disappointed in you when you come back.

This article is everything I wish someone had told me at the start: what indexing actually is, how to pick projects you won’t hate, how to read nineteenth-century handwriting without losing your mind, why you shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes, and how the whole system is changing as computers learn to read cursive. If you’ve never opened FamilySearch before, I’d start with our beginner’s guide to getting started on FamilySearch and then come right back here.

What Indexing Actually Is

Here’s the short version. FamilySearch has spent more than a century photographing the world’s historical records — census pages, birth and death certificates, marriage registers, ship manifests, church parish books, military draft cards. According to the FamilySearch Wiki, the volunteer indexing project has been running since 2006, working through an archive drawn from millions of rolls of microfilm from more than a hundred countries.

But a photograph of a record is not searchable. If your great-grandmother appears on line 47 of a scanned 1920 census page, no search engine in the world can find her — the computer sees an image, not a name. Somebody has to look at that image and type what it says: surname, given name, age, birthplace, relationship. That somebody is an indexer. When thousands of somebodies do this for every name on every page, the record becomes searchable, and the next researcher who types a name into FamilySearch gets a hit in three seconds instead of a three-year microfilm hunt.

That’s all indexing is: turning photographed records into searchable names, one small batch at a time, from your kitchen table. You look at a scanned document on your screen, the website shows you the fields it needs filled in, and you type what the document says. You are not doing genealogy research. You are not building anyone’s tree. You are reading handwriting and typing it into boxes, and in doing so you are handing a stranger the key to their own family.

Why It Matters More Than It Feels Like It Should

I’ll be honest: when you’re deep in a batch of 1940 draft registration cards, it does not feel like sacred work. It feels like data entry. What kept me going was remembering what’s on the other end of it.

Every name I index is a real person who lived, and whose record will now be findable by a real descendant — often a member of the Church looking for family names to take to the temple. The doctrine underneath this is one of the most beautiful reversals in scripture: “They without us should not be made perfect,” Paul wrote, and the Lord told Joseph Smith it works the other direction too — “neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (Doctrine and Covenants 128:15). We need them. They need us. Indexing sits right in the middle of that exchange, quietly making it possible.

Elder David A. Bednar taught that the Spirit of Elijah is “the Holy Ghost bearing witness of the divine nature of the family,” and that it draws people to search for their ancestors (“The Hearts of the Children Shall Turn,” October 2011). I’ve felt small flashes of that witness while indexing — typing the name of a nine-year-old girl on a census page and realizing somebody, somewhere, has been praying to find her. My twenty minutes of typing is the answer to that prayer. That’s not data entry.

Indexing looks like data entry until you remember that every name is a person somebody has been praying to find.

Why It’s the Most Flexible Service in the Church

Think about what most Church service asks of you: a specific place, a specific time, other people depending on your presence. Nursery needs you at 10:30 on Sunday. Ministering needs coordination. A service project needs a Saturday morning. All good things — but they don’t bend around a colicky baby, a rotating shift, or the season of life where you’re caring for an aging parent and can’t leave the house much.

Indexing bends around everything. It is open at 5:40 in the morning and at 11:20 at night. It takes ten minutes or two hours, your choice. It requires no prep, no cleanup, no childcare, no travel, and no pants-with-a-waistband. If you miss a month, there’s no guilt pile-up — the batches wait, and you pick up exactly where you left off. For anyone whose circumstances make traditional service hard — new parents, the homebound, night-shift workers, the chronically ill, students in tiny apartments — this is consecrated service that asks only for the time you actually have.

How to Start: Your First Batch in About Ten Minutes

Here is the whole process, condensed. Everything happens in your web browser at the FamilySearch indexing page — nothing to download, nothing to buy.

• Create a free FamilySearch account if you don’t have one. You likely already do if you’ve ever looked at your family tree or reserved temple names — it’s the same login.
• Go to the indexing section and choose “Web Indexing.” That’s the browser-based tool. There’s no separate program to install, which is the part that surprises most people who remember the old desktop software from years ago.
• Click “Find Batches” and filter to your comfort zone. You can filter available projects by language and difficulty. For your very first batch, pick English and the easiest rating — a typed or neatly printed record like a draft card, not flowing cursive.
• Read the project instructions before you type a single field. Every project has its own short instructions showing exactly which fields to capture and how to handle odd situations. Five minutes here saves you twenty minutes of guessing later.
• Index the batch, one record at a time. Type what the document says — not what it probably means. If it says “Jno,” you type “Jno.” Your job is faithful transcription, not interpretation.
• Submit and notice how you feel. My first batch took me about twenty-five minutes because I second-guessed everything. My tenth took twelve. It gets fast quickly.

Choosing Projects That Fit You

The batch list can feel overwhelming at first — dozens of open projects across countries, record types, and difficulty levels. Here’s how I think about the choice, after burning a few evenings on projects that were wrong for me.

Two practical notes on language. First, if you served a mission or grew up speaking a second language, non-English indexing is where your help is scarcest and most valuable — English-language projects attract the most volunteers, while records in other languages often wait. Second, don’t fake it. A missionary-returned-from-nowhere near as fluent as they remember typing wrong names into a Spanish marriage register isn’t serving; they’re making work for the reviewer. Index the language you can actually read.

As for difficulty, let your energy level choose. I keep two speeds: typed batches for tired Tuesday nights when my brain is oatmeal, and cursive batches for Saturday mornings with coffee when the puzzle is half the fun. Matching the project to your energy is what makes this sustainable for years instead of weeks.

Reading Old Handwriting Without Losing Your Mind

This is the skill that separates indexers who last from indexers who rage-quit, and nobody teaches it to you upfront. Old cursive looks impossible for the first ten minutes and merely difficult forever after. Here is what actually helps.

Use the whole document as your decoder ring

Never judge a letter in isolation. If you can’t tell whether a name starts with an S or an L, scan the rest of the page for a word you can read that contains the same letter written by the same hand. Census enumerators wrote hundreds of entries per page, which means the mystery letter in “Sarepta” is sitting there legibly inside “Smith” three rows down. The document teaches you its own alphabet if you let it.

Context beats eyesight

You don’t have to read every letter if you know what kind of word you’re reading. Birthplace fields on a US census will be states and countries; given names follow the fashions of the era; occupations come from a small cast list — farmer, laborer, seamstress, clerk. When a smudged occupation could be “farmer” or “former,” the fact that this is a 1910 rural county census settles it. You’re not cheating by using context; you’re reading the way humans actually read.

When it’s truly unreadable, say so

Every indexing project has a way to mark a field as unreadable instead of guessing. Use it without guilt. A blank flagged as unreadable can still be searched by the other fields on that record; a confident wrong guess plants a false trail that a descendant may follow for years. When I catch myself squinting at a word and inventing possibilities, that’s my cue to mark it and move on. Humility is a data-quality feature.

Zoom, and step away

The web viewer lets you zoom far beyond what feels reasonable. Use it. And if a single entry has eaten five minutes, skip it, finish the batch, and come back with fresh eyes — I’d say half my “impossible” names resolved instantly on the second pass, once the rest of the page had tuned my eyes to that enumerator’s hand.

About Mistakes: How Review Works, and Why You Can Relax

The single biggest reason people give me for not starting is fear of doing it wrong. “What if I index a name incorrectly and ruin someone’s family history?” I felt that too. Here’s what I didn’t understand: you are not the final authority on anything you type.

Indexed batches go through a review step before they’re published as searchable records. Experienced volunteers check submissions against the images, correct errors, and batches can be returned for fixes. The system is designed around the assumption that indexers are human beings who will occasionally read “Hannah” as “Harriet” — it has a whole layer built to catch exactly that. Your job is to be careful and honest, not perfect. Careful and honest is achievable by anyone; perfect is achievable by no one, including the professional indexers.

So take the pressure off. Do your sincere best, mark what you genuinely can’t read, and trust the process the way you’d want a nervous new ministering brother to trust that the family will forgive an awkward first visit. The work is built to absorb beginner imperfection. That’s not a flaw in the system — it is the system.

Realistic Session Sizes (One Batch Over Breakfast)

My steady rhythm, in a normal week, is one batch most mornings. I put on the coffee, open my laptop at the kitchen table, and index while I eat. A typical typed batch of a census page or a stack of draft cards takes me ten to twenty minutes. Some mornings I do two batches; some weeks I do none. Over a year, that unimpressive little habit adds up to thousands of names — which is the part I have to remind myself of, because no single morning ever feels like much.

This is the same lesson I learned with scripture study: the small daily version beats the heroic monthly version. Ten minutes a day, five days a week, is roughly forty hours of indexing a year. Forty hours is more time than most of us will ever give to a single service project in our lives — and it costs nothing but breakfast. The indexing page keeps a running count of your totals, and I’ll admit the number motivates me more than I expected it to. Watching it climb past ten thousand names felt like a quiet milestone nobody else would notice, which somehow made it better.

One practical tip: keep the bar low enough that you never dread it. The moment indexing becomes a “sit down for a serious two-hour session” obligation is the moment it starts competing with everything else you love. One batch is the whole commitment. Everything beyond that is bonus.

Indexing With Teenagers (It Works Better Than You’d Think)

Our oldest was thirteen when I first pulled him into it, mostly because I needed a family history activity for a weeknight and had run out of ideas that didn’t involve a spreadsheet. What I didn’t expect was how naturally it fits teenagers. The work is genuinely screen-based, immediately countable, and completable in one sitting — three things most Church service is not. There’s a number that goes up when they finish, and teenagers understand numbers that go up.

What worked for us: sitting side by side on separate laptops, each on our own batch, racing to see who finishes first (he wins now, and I let him know it wounds me). We talk while we type — about the weird names, the family of eleven kids crammed into one census household, the nineteen-year-old “farm laborer” the same age as him. It turned into some of the easiest conversation we’ve had, because side-by-side work removes the eye contact that makes teenage conversation feel like an interrogation. If your family already does family home evening activities together, an occasional indexing night slots in naturally — twenty minutes of batches, a treat, done.

A caution: let them start on easy typed batches too, and don’t correct their technique mid-batch like a backseat driver. My son’s first batch had a handful of errors a reviewer probably fixed. His second was better. What mattered is that he asked, on his own, whether we could do it again the next week.

How AI Is Changing What’s Left for Humans

If you’ve heard that computers can now read old handwriting, you’ve heard correctly — and it’s worth understanding, because it changes what indexing means going forward. FamilySearch now offers an experimental Full-Text Search in its FamilySearch Labs, which uses computer models to transcribe entire collections — including handwritten ones — and make every word searchable, even in records no human has ever indexed. Collections that would have taken volunteers decades became searchable in a fraction of the time.

So is human indexing over? No, but its center of gravity is shifting. The routine, high-volume work — the millions of straightforward typed records — is exactly what computers do well. What’s left for humans is increasingly the work computers still do badly: faded ink, cramped cursive, damaged pages, records in less-common languages and scripts, and the judgment calls about what a smudge actually says. In practice, that means the batches available to volunteers will keep tilting toward the interesting, puzzling end of the spectrum.

I’ve made my peace with this, and I’d encourage you to as well. The goal was never to keep humans busy typing; the goal was always to make the records findable so families can be gathered. If a computer reads the easy half faster, that frees us for the hard half — and the hard half is honestly more rewarding. Nobody bonded with a teenager over a perfectly typed form. They bond over decoding a 200-year-old name together.

Start Tonight

If you’ve read this far, you have everything you need except a batch on your screen. So here is my actual suggestion: tonight, after dinner or after the kids are down, go to the FamilySearch indexing page, sign in, find the easiest English project on the list, and do one batch. One. Set a timer if you want. When you submit it, notice that you just did real temple-and-family-history service in your socks, on an ordinary weeknight, without asking anyone’s permission.

Then do it again tomorrow over breakfast, or next week, or whenever your life has a ten-minute gap. That’s the whole secret of indexing — it doesn’t ask for a version of you with more time. It takes the time you have and turns it, name by name, into someone else’s miracle. I’ll be at my kitchen table tomorrow morning doing the same, one batch, one coffee, one family at a time.

This article reflects personal experience and study, not an official statement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Scripture and talk references cited in the text can be read at ChurchofJesusChrist.org: Doctrine and Covenants 128 (verse 15) and Elder David A. Bednar, “The Hearts of the Children Shall Turn” (October 2011). FamilySearch features described were checked against the live indexing pages and FamilySearch Wiki in August 2026; indexing is free and open to anyone, member or not.