Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Friday, November 25, 2016

Indexing for families by families with Kindex

From time to time, I have been watching the development of the Kindex.org program for doing document transcriptions and personal or family genealogical indexing. The program provides a straightforward way to transcribe documents from the FamilySearch.org Memories section and then you can add the transcription either as a story or as a new document. Since I last wrote about the program, it has developed additional features and is definitely becoming more useful. You can sign into the program with your FamilySearch login and password and then you get a personalized screen such as this:


There are still some issues, but they are minor. When you go to "transcribe" a photo, you can write a narrative but tagging has yet to be implemented. Transcribing, makes the content of the image useful for searching, just as is intended by the Indexing program of FamilySearch. However, your own documents and photos are not searchable as images, hence the need for a personal indexing program.

For example, this is a photo of a grave marker for my Great-grandfather. Unless I indicate what is on the grave marker, the image is not searchable by his name. In addition, the program allows for collaboration between family members who can work on the same documents from FamilySearch.org.


Once I have transcribed the grave marker, the document in this case, the transcription then goes into my Kindex Archive.


If I wished to do so, I could copy the text and then click on View Original and add the text as a comment to the original. Right now, there is a limitation on editing any images or documents that I personally did not submit to FamilySearch.org Memories. This severely limits the ability of family members to actually edit the items in the Memories section. So, having a place to add and store the additional information about the images is important. It would be helpful if FamilySearch allowed me to add information to the images uploaded by others.

This is a good program to watch and use and will undoubtedly get better.

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