IGS Blog

Indiana Marriage Indexing Project (1811-1959)

The Indiana Marriage Indexing Project is a joint project of the Indiana Genealogical Society and FamilySearch (representing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). The aim is to create a statewide marriage index that begins with each Indiana county's earliest surviving records and goes up to 1959. When finished, the index will be put online as a free searchable database.

FamilySearch has part of the Indiana Marriages 1811-1959 online - it contains entries for 35 counties: Adams County, Allen County, Bartholomew County, Benton County, Blackford County, Boone County, Brown County, Carroll County, Clark County, Clay County, Daviess County, Dearborn County, Decatur County, DeKalb County, Delaware County, Dubois County, Elkhart County, Fayette County, Floyd County, Fountain County, Franklin County, Fulton County, Gibson County, Hamilton County, Harrison County, Hendricks County, Henry County, Huntington County, Jackson County, Jay County, Marshall County, Ohio County, Owen County, Rush County and Sullivan County.

Volunteer

Indexers work from home and at their own pace. They login to FamilySearch Indexing with their username and password, and download a batch of marriage records, which take just 30-45 minutes to index. You just need to have an Internet connection (broadband is recommended because of the large size of the files), and an up-to-date version of an Internet browser.

Windows XP and Vista are supported by the indexing software. Mac users, you can also do indexing. You need a 64 bit processor in order to run the version of Java used in FamilySearchIndexing. Click on the apple in the upper left hand corner and go to About This Mac. You need to see that your Processor says Core 2 Duo, Quad-Core Intel Xeon, or something along the lines of Xeon. Your Mac OS X should be at least version 10.5.1 and it is recommended that you upgrade to version 10.5.7 which is compatible with the most recent Java security update. Go to Apple and download the update of the version compatible with your machine. The most recent version is at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/javaformacosx104release9.html. Install the update and go to FamilySearch Indexing, register and start indexing.

View sample screens of the indexing software: Sample Screen 1   Sample Screen 2

If you would like to volunteer to index Indiana marriage records, please go to FamilySearch Indexing's signup page.

Questions?

If you have any questions about the project, please contact project coordinator Shirley Richison Fields (indexing@indgensoc.org)

© 2012 Indiana Genealogical Society