Frustration, the PAF file, and Family Search

Over a decade ago I heard that you could search ancestry.com for any information about your ancestors. I was excited to finally find some key pieces of information I had been missing. I set up an account and began to search. To my disappointment, I found nothing. I mean literally nothing. No records existed in their database that included Guatemala.

A few years ago even Ancestry.com didn't have any records from Central America. At the time, Ancestry.com was mainly composed of European records. I hit a dead end. I was told to make this thing called a "paf" file (Personal Ancestral File) using software that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had available as a resource to the public. 

My PAF file included my parents and grandparents. It had one exact birth date for my grandpa and that was it.  My family tree looked pathetic. It was more like a family twig! So I printed out my family twig and kept it in a box of memories, where it remained for a long long time. Untouched. No new info to add to it.

A few years later, I was in college and found out that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints came out with a family history website and you no longer had to have a PAF file. You could just upload the information online! Wooo hooo! This time around you could actually search the records online. During this time, my husband and I got called as Family History Consultants. 

Long story short, we taught our church ward members about using the new family search website, building up your family tree, and submitting family names for Temple work (To be discussed in a future post). I felt like a hypocrite. There I was teaching others how to search for their ancestors and helping them find new names, meanwhile, my family tree was pretty bald. I wanted so bad to find something! The reason why I couldn't find any information or records online was because the Guatemala (and most Central American) records have not all been indexed yet. 

So why are they not indexed? Because there are MILLIONS of images to go through, and they aren't just looked at once. They have to be arbitrated multiple times for accuracy and most of the indexers are volunteers. I was told over and over to be patient. Others told me I could go search in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City for the microfilms. However, at the time I lived in Idaho and I couldn't afford to travel and stay in the area because of school and my family. 

The following screenshot from Family Search will give you an idea of Index statistics from Guatemala. There are only 4 current active index projects. There are still many, many, many more records waiting to be indexed of course, however, they want the volunteers to complete several small batches at a time to make it faster more efficient.

"Patience is a virtue," they say...  but I'm not gonna sit around and wait 5 years to get one piece of information. Who knows how long it will take to index the country, let alone all the Central and South American records?

 In the mean time... if you don't want to wait years and years, there may be a better option....

Browsing through the whole Family Search collections and isolating your search efforts.