How to index 100,000 names in a month

My ward indexed over 105,000 names in the month of November. I thought I would write a blog post about it and described how we did it in case any other ward would like to do it at some point.

My stake has an indexing competition every November and February. Last February, my ward indexed over 35,000 names and won the competition. As the November competition was getting closer, I went to a training for the Elders Quorum and Relief Society Presidencies with the stake presidency. We discussed all the exciting changes that were taking place in the church. While I was there, I had an overwhelming feeling that the Lord is hastening is work, and so we need to as well. I felt that 35,000 names just weren’t enough. I couldn’t get the number 100,000 out of my head. I had seen a video on LDS.org called the OMNI project. The link is found here for those who would like to watch it. It is about a stake in California that indexed 1,000,000 names as a stake. I didn’t have any influence over the stake and what we did, but I did have some say in what happened in our ward, so I figured if we were to do our part of matching that million mark, it would be 100,000 names as a ward because an average stake has ten wards.

It still seemed like too big of a number. When I told it to people, they said I was crazy. That’s how I knew it must be a good idea. Part of my reasoning was that of the 35,000 names indexed in February, 30,000 was between two apartments. If we were to set the next goal as 40,000 or 50,000, then everyone would just assume that the same two apartments would be able to reach that number which quite possibly we could. However, by saying 100,000, everyone would realize that there is no possible way that two apartments could get that on their own, and that we would need everyone’s help.

I broke the goal down into everyone getting 1,000 names each. People still called me crazy, but once I began to explain that it is only 33 names a day, which would take about 15-20 minutes of indexing a day, they began to see that it was plausible. That’s when I began to publicize it. First, I told everyone about it. That’s all I talked about for most the month of October and through the entire month of November. We had ministering interviews, and my two counselors and I challenged all the elders to do it and to help make sure their ministering sisters did it. We have a girl in our ward who is a film major, so I asked her to make a video to inspire the ward. She did an incredible job, and it can be found here if you’d like to use it to inspire your wards. We then organized a pre-November fireside to get everyone pumped. I invited a few popular BYU professors to come and speak at it, but because it was late notice, they couldn’t come.

The fireside was incredible. We started with a testimony from a girl who had indexed thousands of names in February. We then brought up a batch and showed how to index one. I then explained the incentives that the ward was doing to help us index. We then showed the video, and ended with a talk from David Williams, the greatest indexer at BYU who had indexed 10,000 names in February. The fireside was incredible. It really seemed to be the turning point in convincing everyone there that they could do the 1000 names.

Some incentives that we did were bishop promised a pizza party at his house with homemade pizza in his brick oven for the top two indexing family home evening groups. The criteria were the amount of people that got over 1,000 names with the tiebreaker going to the group with the most total indexed. By the end of the challenge, the competition was so close, and there were so many people that worked so hard, we decided to open the pizza party to anybody that indexed over 1,000 names. We had indexing marathons on some Saturdays or weeknights where people could come and go while we watched movies and indexed throughout the day. Family home evening groups would index together for Monday night activities. We would go together on Sunday nights to lab computers on campus to index there because indexing is a lot faster on lab computers. People would index in class to help them stay awake, some people indexed at their work (for those with jobs that allowed that). My roommates pulled three all nighters throughout the month just watching movies and indexing until 6 or 7 in the morning. The energy was contagious, and people would randomly catch fire through the month. Some would even index 1,000 names in as little as three days. One of my roommates did 1,000 names in one day.

One of the most powerful incentives we had was the paper chains we put up around the floor of our apartment complex where our ward is. Every ten names indexed equaled one paper chain, so by the end of the month, we had 10,000 paper chains up around the complex. We would get together at our weekly ward activity called ward prayer on Sundays, and we would staple the chains together. We did about 2,500 every week. We would then go up and hang them around the complex. We filled the entire floor multiple times. It had powerful symbolism because Doctrine and Covenants 128:18 says “The earth will be cursed unless there is a welding link between the fathers and the children”. That is why we did chains; they were the welding link. It was symbolic of the unifying of the dead and our ward. They served as a visual reminder. It wasn’t feasible for the leaders to go to every apartment every day to remind people to index, but the chains would remind them every day to index. It also was a fun, exciting activity as everyone would staple the chains together. It created a sense of togetherness as everyone worked together to build this project.

I was amazed by the blessings that we received for doing this. My personal test scores rose, others got better grades, my roommate got a girlfriend and a business, overall happiness in the ward increased, unification of the ward and apartments was incredible, revelation about important life decisions was received, people overcame depressive feelings, and power to resist temptation increased among many other blessings. Every person that participated in a decent amount can testify of the blessings that they received.

The result was forty people over 1,000 names, with ten over 3,000. I indexed 7,700 names, and the leading indexer had over 13,000 names. It was essential to have people do more than 1,000 names in order to get to 100,000 because we didn’t get to a hundred people getting 1,000 as we had wanted. All of us have a much greater testimony of indexing and family history work. I still dream about getting a stake to do one million names like the stake in California did.