Cousins and Kindex founders Cathy Gilmore and Kimball Clark are thrilled to be included among the group of 10 semifinalists competing in the RootsTech 2017 Innovator Showdown.
Dorothy Clark at the World Conference of Records, 1980
For Kimball and Cathy, what began as a project to scan their grandmother’s records grew into a realization they needed to do more to make her life’s records not only accessible by her large posterity, but also searchable, engaging, and easy to manage. This idea grew into Kindex, a web software archival and indexing tool that enables anyone to gather, index, and share records in a collaborative archive.
A unique product in a sea of competitive family history technology, Kindex is the only web software indexing tool dedicated to helping everyday people manage and share their records. “Most people don’t realize it, but almost everyone has an archive management problem,” Cathy said. “Almost every home has a box of letters, a shelf of journals, a bin stuffed with documents of all kinds—and it’s all unsearchable and at risk of being lost over time.” With so many records at risk of being lost, thrown away, or damaged, Kindex helps families rescue their records, making them accessible and searchable for generations to come.
After reaching the semifinals in the 2016 RootsTech Innovator Showdown, Cathy and Kimball have tirelessly moved Kindex forward, fueled by bootstrap earnings via scanning services and archive pre-sales.
Milestones include:
MyKindex (a personal archive & indexing tool. Release January 2017).
Kindex Family (a collaborative archive & indexing tool. Release February 2017)
Continued development of Kindex Projects, a custom indexing platform for groups such genealogy and historical societies (Release Spring 2017)
Expansion of youth market through continuing development of a mobile app and planning of youth record gathering events
Explored B2B partnerships and applications of indexed archives.
Increased interest in the stories gleaned from family letters, journals, and other historical documents, coupled with the increasing demand for accessible, fully-searchable archives, places Kindex in a position to be a significant disruptor in the family history market. No longer just about names, dates, and trees, Kindex paves the way for families and groups to create narrative genealogies based on their primary source records. “We are a unique and innovative product in a market that is evolving quickly,” Kimball said. “The stories made searchable by Kindex are the gateway where increasing numbers are entering family history.”
Kindex believes that every life, no matter how important or insignificant, deserves to be remembered in history. We are proud to play a role in the rescue of records, and invite you to try it out on kindex.org.
Not quite ready to throw out your college essays, old dance photos, and bills from the previous century? Kindex has a solution for you. Not just for old family records, Kindex is great for any record or source you want to preserve, access, or share. Here are some of our favorite ideas.
1. Declutter
Create a living family archive with document collections for each family member. Scan school papers, calendars, awards, art, and report cards. Scan that growing pile of back-to-school notices, calendars, and checklists you can’t seem to get through. Have a pile of random papers you’re saving because you might need them someday? Scan them. Then throw them away. Okay, most of them.
2. Collaborate on a cookbook
Scan your favorite recipes, invite your friends to do the same, then add them to a Kindex archive. Collaborate together in transcribing old, handwritten recipe cards into a searchable database of recipes.
3. Organize receipts, bills, and other yucky stuff
Bills, receipts, and statements are by far my least favorite form of clutter. Yet, I can’t seem to throw them away. Scan, add to your Kindex archive, add metadata (single or batch form), and notes. Viola! You have a searchable archive. Now start shredding.
4. Share family trusts and other private records
Scan your family trust papers and add them to your a private Kindex archive. Invite board members to the archive where they can search and access the records.
5. Create a personal archive
Start your own private, personal archive and add special records like letters, diaries, and photos. Can’t part with your college essays, teenage-angst poetry drafts, and embarrassing love notes? Scan and archive on Kindex – before your kids find them.
6. Start a research project
Have a special project or hobby? Organize, transcribe, and search digitized content and sources on a private or public Kindex archive. Research alone, or invite other researchers to collaborate.
7. Teach about history
Use Kindex to teach children and students about history using primary sources from Kindex.
Invite each student to transcribe a record and share what they learned
Search for historical events in your family archive
Study how historical events impacted your family
8. Facilitate record access and searchability for your society
Start a private collaborative archive for your genealogy or historical society. Create collections to share with your members, start a crowdsourced transcription project, and add the Kindex CSV data download all the transcriptions and metadata to your society’s database. You can even provide Kindex archives for families that donate their records to your society. Need help getting a collection of records transcribed? Create a public Kindex archive and invite others to help you index the records.
9. Create an archive for “lost” or orphaned photos.
Create a public Kindex archive for your “lost”, unidentified, or orphaned photos. Add the metadata you know, and invite others to search, transcribe, and share your records. (See found.kindex.org)
10. Start a “record rescue” for your family organization
Tired of guessing where all the family records went? Conduct a “record rescue” for your family organization to gather, scan, and archive family records. Host a “record reunion”, scanning party, or family transcribe-a-thon. Collaborate with cousins around the world in making your family’s records accessible and searchable to all your family.
Do you wish there was a better way to archive and search your family’s letters, journals, and photos? Are you still using a combination of spreadsheets, PDFs, and word processing tools to transcribe your family history records? For Archive Awareness Week, we are reprising our top ten reasons why we love Kindex.
We’ve got SaaS. Kindex is web software containing tools to help you archive and index, and search your digital records. There is no software to install, just go to kindex.org and create an account.
We ❤ hoarders. We all know the feeling. Someone in your family wants to borrow the priceless family record you’ve kept in your home for years? Hard pass. Rather than wait until they pry it from your cold, dead hands, why not digitize those records and put them on Kindex? You can make your archive public or private, and invite others to view and index. So, whether your a record-keeper, a record-hoarder, or you’re a downright record-hider, Kindex helps you share your precious family records without the risk of your great-nephew spilling his Starbucks on your grandfather’s journal. And, you can learn what’s been hiding in Aunt Sue’s closet all these years (well, besides those bell-bottoms).
We have layers. With Kindex you can add layers of searchable data to your records. We move beyond titles and descriptions to include valuable data points such as record provenance, transcription, keywords, date, place, and addtional tags.
Share the love. Are you the family historian that gets stuck with all the work? Not anymore. Create a Kindex Family archive and share your records (and the indexing work) with anyone. Get your family and friends involved, and they might learn why you’re so crazy about your ancestors. Or just why you’re crazy. Still, they may be inspired to add a few records of their own to share with you, so it’s a win-win.
Thanks for the Memories. Kindex is integrated with FamilySearch, which means you can import the Memories you’ve added to FamilySearch into Kindex and make them searchable with our indexing tools. In the coming weeks we’ll also have the ability to share Kindex records back to FamilySearch. That means all the people you tagged with FamilySearch IDs in your record transcriptions? They’ll get shared with those people on FamilySearch.
Be a rescuer. Having a well-preserved letter, journal, or diary of an ancestor is at the top of many people’s wish list. Kindex offers families the ability to grant this wish by helping gather, index, and share records that would otherwise be lost, damaged, or thrown away. Rescue your family records on Kindex—your descendants will thank you.
Search your way. Tired of searching huge genealogy databases and getting too many (or not enough) results? With Kindex you can create personal or family archives containing just the records you want, so you get the search results you want.
Like, settle down with the family history. We get it. You would rather research Alexander Hamilton, or bugs, or Roald Dahl? You can use Kindex to archive, index, and research any topic. Put your documents on Kindex, and start indexing. Just make sure you’re the record holder, or you have permission to upload and index that record.
You’re special, but not special enough to have your own indexing software. Some archives are lucky — they have their own custom indexing software. But if you’re not the Smithsonian or National Archives, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck doing the old Spreadsheet/Microsoft Word/PDF tango. Are you an archivist, historian, researcher, or librarian who needs a custom solution for indexing a collection? Kindex Projects, due to be released in Spring 2017, will support records that require custom indexing fields, multiple download formats, and privacy options.
Kids these days. It’s been said that kids nowadays don’t read—they search. By offering a searchable database of family records, Kindex provides a familiar and fun gateway for people to enter and learn quickly about their ancestor. Then, after they read an indexed record, they may be inspired to jump in and index one themselves. The feeling you get when you read and transcribe a record your ancestor kept is one we hope everyone feels—especially our kids.
If you’ve followed Kindex for very long, you’ll know that we frequently post about our Grandma Dorothy Smith Clark. Today I want to share with you why her story is so important to us.
As a child, I asked Grandma Clark what she would like for her birthday. “Tell me a story,” she answered. This voice speaks to me still. As a young teenager she encouraged me to create and write. A visit with her hardly went by without her suggesting, “Write me a poem.” That encouragement speaks to me still. Today, when I read her letters and diaries, I see her notes in the margins revealing instructions for a personal history—a project she never completed before passing away. Those notes speak to me still.
A marked-up page from Dorothy’s life history.
When my cousin Kimball and I decided to launch Kindex, our aim was to create a solution for the enormous body of work our grandma left behind. While it was impossible for Dorothy to envision the type of indexing tool we are building today, I like to think she had a sense of what was to come. She had the gift of foresight, the ability to anticipate and address needs. In a sense, building Kindex will finish the work she started, while also helping us tell her story.
And what is her story? I’ll share just a part. While still a young mother, Dorothy completed her Book of Remembrance. A work of art in its own right, its pages reveal her deep sense of ancestral belonging, records of her parents’ and grandparents’ spiritual gifts, and a recognition of her own divine purpose and talents. As Dorothy developed her own spiritual gifts, her ability to discern the needs of others and act in faith became a catalyst for ministering to others, notwithstanding the fear and shyness she often felt. To the question posed to the Savior, “Who is my neighbor?” Dorothy could answer: the plumber, the piano tuner, the refugee, or the outcast—anyone in her path in need of help.
A watercolored page from the Dorothy Smith Clark Book of Remembrance
Dorothy’s 1964 poster sketch titled “We Believe in Sharing” affirmed the scope of her desires: to give all she had—her talents, testimony, labor, food, and possessions, bringing “more happiness, enrich[ing] the world, sharing all that has come to us as a church and as individual members.”[1] Often overcome with social anxiety or limited by her heath, Dorothy preferred personal visits to projects, created art to share the gospel, and wrote hundreds of inspired letters that today stand as a witness to bear one another’s burdens. Without prejudice or judgment, her nurturing influence reached beyond her own nine children when she became a foster mother to two Navajo children and a personal advocate for many Southeast Asian refugees who affectionately called her “Mother Clark”.
Dorothy Clark with husband Ellsworth, foster son Cody Black, and Cody’s family.
While Dorothy’s art was never exhibited, her painting of Paul Wildhaber’s “The Armor of Righteousness” was the centerpiece of her home. Unlike others who traditionally depicted male religious figures, 20-year-old Dorothy changed the painting’s subject from hero to heroine, thus broadening the view of those who are “armed in righteousness”. From her childhood fairy gifts to the ministering of the needful and forgotten, her visionary example of what a woman can do endures through her depiction of this righteous and strong heroine.
Dorothy Smith in Paul Wildhaber’s studio.
Dorothy Smith’s completed “Armor of Righteousness”
Dorothy continued her talent of creating and sharing family histories well into the last years of her life. In 1980 she participated in the World Conference of Records in a booth of her own design.
Dorothy at the World Conference of Records in 1980
As I think about her life, I see a patterns emerging as her children, grandchildren, and beyond strive to finish what she started. Kindex is just a small part of a larger effort to emulate the kind of woman she was. Sometimes, when I feel overwhelmed at the pressures of launching a startup while still raising a young family, I look at the binders and boxes of her records and think, “Soon, we’ll know your story. Not long yet.”
Dorothy and Ellsworth in New Zealand, 1974
[i] Dorothy Smith, Sketches. “We Believe in Sharing”, 1964
Lehi Larson Smith1, son of Emma Larson and Jesse N. Smith, died in the Argonne Forest in France on October 28, 1918, while fighting as a soldier in World War I. His mother Emma later said that she knew she had lost her son from the moment it happened, and that there was no surprise when the official word came.
While transcribing a letter Emma wrote to her granddaughter Dorothy 23 years later, I received additional insight into Emma’s feelings about losing a son to war. Written in 1941, against the backdrop of an escalating war in Europe and North Africa, the letter reveals the loss Emma still felt about her son Lehi, and her admission that her desire to protect her family was greater than any loyalty she felt toward her country.
…our children are our most precious jewels, the more we have the richer we are. I am not willing to raise boys for cannon fodder. I have furnished one but not any more. I am not looking for war in this country should it come to us I have grand children but am not willing for any of them to go. I may not be very loyal to my country. I am not converted to wars.
While we may have the names and dates that history provides, nothing compares to one’s own words to reveal what we cannot ascertain by mere historical facts. These small insights give me greater understanding of Emma, who is my 2nd great grandmother. History must not be names and dates alone, but must be enhanced with the truths and stories that only these sources can give.
Here is a full transcription of the letter. Original spelling intact. Punctuation added for clarity. 2
Mesa Arizona
Feb 26 1941
Dearest Dorothy,
How much I have appreciated the Christmas card and the photos of the three lovely children. I hop you will pardon my for neglecting to write to you and thank you for remembering me. I have felt like I wasn’t worth remembering. Your mother sent me one of your letters you had writen to her in Heber. It was very interesting to me you seem to be a very busy woman. I think you must have a wonderful good man to help. You couldn’t do so many things and care for your little flock too. Cleona is like you & good helper in the Joseph City ward. But our children are our most precious jewels, the more we have the richer we are. I am not willing to raise boys for cannon fodder I have furnished one but not any more. I am not looking for war in this country. Should it come to us I have grand children but am not willing for any of them to go. I may not be very loyal to my country. I am not converted to wars. Hitler may think he is an angel, I think headquarters is in Germany for the devil.
I can’t help but that Ellsworth could get a school down here in Arizona they pay more here and then I could see more of you. I thot this winter in Price I wouldn’t be here very long myself I cannot brag much myself yet but I am gaining any some I am not loafing quite as much as I did. Your mother done a good part by me in Snowflake which I have appreciated very much. We have been rained on so much down here that it is getting tiresome today it is trying to quit I hope it will, the citris show is on this week they are having a great time some of the men is growing beards they all expect the prize. If I was to be judge not any of them would get it that I have seen the fruit is nice and cheap too. I would like to send you a sackfull but they may hold it up on the line.
We have all kinds of flowers here so it isn’t very cold. I have geraniums blooming all winter growing outdoors on the north side of the house. I hope you young folks can keep well when you are well you can work. I would love to run in and see you all.
I have felt so proud over the way you made the letters on the envelope. I put it where it could be seen & callers pick it up & ask who done that. My granddaughter. And too I could show the great grands.
While serving a Mormon mission in the Northwester States, Lehi received a call from Montana Draft Board to serve in World War I as a soldier in the United States Army. Before departing for his military duties he asked Drucilla McKay, a young lady acquaintance in the mission field, to marry him. She accepted and the pair were married in the Salt Lake Temple on March 20, 1918. They had only a few days to share their marital bliss before he reported to Camp Funston for military training. Lehi Smith was soon shipped overseas where he served with the 89th Division for several months in the St. Mihiel Campaign. On Oct. 28, 1918 he suffered a direct hit from an artillery shell. He was not yet 28 years of age when he was killed in the Argonne Forest in France.
From “Life Sketch” written by Lehi T. Smith, a nephew to Lehi Larson Smith. Material obtained from sketches by Hyrum Smith, Lorana Smith Broadbent, and Seraphine Smith Frost in The Kinsman, Vol. XVIII No.2, March 1964.
