Last night, I sat down and decided to finish off my 10 pages of indexing the South Carolina Estate Files. It was a great experience. I learned a lot about how estate files worked, I made improvements on deciphering handwriting, and I helped out the genealogy community! It was a win win situation.

I can’t say it was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I found it a bit of a challenge, but a fun one! It was a big eye opener for me in terms of what the country was like at the time. I was indexing estates from 1849, so it was before the Civil War. It was so strange to see people referred to like they were. I just can’t imagine living in a world where that was happening. Even though I’ve always known about that dark part of our history, this made it so much more real to me.

Once I got into the swing of indexing, it was much easier and I got a bit faster (which wasn’t the point of it, I was previously doing just 1 page every few days). Those last 6 pages flew by! Between these records and indexing for FamilySearch, I’ve realized how much I really enjoy the challenge of deciphering handwriting!

Once I knock out this site redesign in the next few weeks, I’m definitely doing another 10! If you’d like to volunteer too, you can sign up at the LowCountry Africana website. This is a very important project and even if it doesn’t pertain to your family, you could be helping out someone else!