Indexing 111 Years of Ancestry
American Ancestors leans on iMerit annotation services to transcribe & index huge volumes of sacramental records that help connect customers with their ancestry.
Challenge
American Ancestors is a genealogical organization that serves as the nation’s leading comprehensive resource for family history research. Traditionally, the American Ancestors team would partner with volunteers to annotate historic documents, which would then be made available on their website.
After partnering with the Archdiocese of Boston, Molly, the Associate Director of Database Content, was faced with digitizing 1300+ books of sacramental records containing information around baptisms, marriages, confirmations, and more taken between 1789 and 1900. American Ancestors’ traditional data labeling process involved volunteer efforts using excel spreadsheets to annotate the data.
As each book averages 200 pages each, it became clear that the company’s in-house approach to data labeling could not meet the scale of this project. Molly realized that professional annotation would be the only way American Ancestors could meet the needs of this project, and make these records searchable for genealogists, historians, and people all over the world.
“Working with iMerit is an integral part of our mission to add new genealogical content to our website. Through these new names available for search, we can connect people with tangible proof of their ancestors’ lives and experience.”
Solution
Upon accessing the documentation, iMerit teams began analyzing how the records were maintained, organized, and previously indexed. Many of the records were hand-written, and required page-by-page assessment to be properly indexed for American Ancestry’s records. Much of the data required genealogical expertise, which mandated expertise from iMerit's annotation experts.
Working closely with Molly, iMerit began iterating around which workflows could successfully meet the scale of the project within a reasonable time frame. The iMerit team sent this information to its centers of annotation excellence, where expert data annotators began pouring over the documents.
After developing a custom end-to-end workflow that accounted for the genealogical expertise required for proper annotation, the iMerit team successfully met the scale required to annotate all 1300+ books that would allow American Ancestors’ customers to search and discover them on the website.
“Working with iMerit is an integral part of our mission to add new genealogical content to our website. Through these new names available for search, we can connect people with tangible proof of their ancestors’ lives and experience.”
Result
After working with iMerit, the records from these 1300+ books became searchable on the American Ancestors website along with 14M+ names of people’s ancestors. Customers immediately began searching this database, with feedback continually proving positive to the American Ancestors team as users are regularly discovering connections to their ancestry.
Today, American Ancestors and iMerit are working together on a similar project involving data from the period of 1901-1920.
