This category is defined as a person over the age of 21 years of age who has been involved in digitizing, indexing, or otherwise electronically making previously unavailable genealogical materials accessible to other people.
Jim Powell, Jr.
There are tens of thousands of people digitizing, indexing, and preserving images of the past, whether they be document images, photographs, postcards, newspapers, and so many diverse records. New materials are literally discovered everyday. It takes the efforts of countless unsung heroes to organize and prepare these historical and genealogical treasures for preservation, and then to generate the highest quality digital images possible. The images then need to be indexed for ease of location, and transcriptions to fulfill placing them in context.
Our first individual winner in the Unsung Heroes Award is Jim Powell, Jr., of Waldo, Alachua County Florida. An employee of the Alachua County Clerk of Court, it was his love of history, programming experience, and photography that began his journey into digitizing the ancient records, and developing a huge multi-state group of dedicated volunteer who help clean up digital images, index them, and every-word transcribe their contents. Over 500,000 images have been digitized and are every-word searchable, and over 35,000 pages have been transcribed. Visit the Ancient Records:
http://blog.genealogyguys.com/search/label/Unsung%20Heroes%20Award%20Jim%20Powell