A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at my tree on FamilySearch with my nephew, Tony. He is 12 years old and interested in doing family history. This makes my heart soar, especially since I have a hard time getting my own children interested in doing it.

I decided to look at my mother’s Bolivian line with him. This line is very difficult to research because the records for Bolivia are so limited. The only available records are from the Catholic Church books that were put on film decades ago by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days. Several years ago, these films were only accessible at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. My mother and I spent many long hours there scrolling through images of baptismal, marriage and burial records to find a family name.

More recently, the church digitized these films so we could “scroll” through images of the records on our personal computers at home. This saved multiple trips to the downtown library for my mother and I, but we found it was still time consuming to look through them. Each film had hundreds or even thousands of images on them.

Then came the day we were waiting for – when our treasured Bolivian church records would be indexed! Thanks to dedicated volunteers, many of the records that my mother and I spent hours looking for were now showing up as “hints” for ancestors in our tree. The research is so much easier now and we are finding new records we missed in our endless browsing sessions.

This takes me back to my nephew. As I showed him the Bolivian side of our tree, I was taken aback by all the hints that were showing up next to our ancestors’ names that were not there the last time I looked. The tree was peppered with light blue circles indicating that a record had been matched to someone on the tree. An indexing project must have recently been completed for the films that contained these records of our ancestors.

Many of the hints were for records that my mother and I had already found (the hard way), but we were thrilled to find that there were also new records we hadn’t seen before. A few of them had people we didn’t know existed, which was very exciting.

I am so grateful for all the indexers who spend time doing this service so people like me can finally find the records and ancestors we know are hidden in these films.

This also makes doing family history work easier for people like Tony, who want to participate in this work, but don’t know where to start. I told him to keep looking for those hints! They may not be there today, but you may find that they are all over your tree tomorrow.

-Christy Pugh, Innovations and Communications, Granite FamilySearch Center