Kindex is an online platform that offers both family researchers and genealogy societies an affordable way to build their own online archive of documents, records, letters, photos and other ephemera. A Kindex archive includes indexing tools like transcription, metadata and tagging to make finding specific items easier. As the owner of your archive on Kindex, you control who has access to your archive and what level of access each user has.

You can post PDF documents along with both JPG and PNG photos to your Kindex archive. There are a number of tools supporting batch uploads and adding metadata to a record batch. The file size limit is a generous 15MB per file. You can even invite your research cousins as “collaborators” to access, search, add and index records.

Kindex offers two plans. The Kindex Cloud and Kindex Closet. With Kindex Cloud your archive is searchable and even accessible via external search engines (Duck Duck Go, Google, Bing, etc.). There are no limits to the number of records you upload or the number of collaborators helping maintain your archive. Kindex Cloud costs a very affordable $5.00/month but with a bit of effort you can reduce that to $0. Index twenty records in your archive within the billing month and Kindex will give you a $5.00 credit for the next month. You can’t beat that kind of deal!

Kindex Closet is a private archive. Only owners and collaborators can search a Closet archive. The Closet subscription costs $10.00/month and also provides the $5.00 monthly credit for indexing twenty records within the billing month.

On either plan, there is no limit to the number of collaborators you can have in your Kindex archive.

Your Kindex archive is organized into collections. You choose how you want to set up your collections. In this example you see surname collections with sub-collections to define types of records. Each collection shows how many items it contains.

To view an item, click on it and Kindex will display the image along with the information panel for that item. The information panel is used to transcribe the content for this item. Click the Record Info item at the top of this panel to display the metadata panel.

Did you notice the comment box below the transcription panel? Collaborators can communicate with each other using the comments feature. There’s often a good chance that your collaborators may have more information about a particular archive item.

Here’s where you add keywords, date, place and provenance for this item. When that is finished, click the Update Record button and you will be returned to the record screen. Once the transcription and record information has been added, change the transcription screen to Complete, then click the SAVED button and your indexing for this record is done.

Here’s what a transcribed and indexed item looks like to a visitor. Since this a Kindex Cloud account, it’s quite likely that a research cousin will find the records you have posted. This screen shows what a record will look like to someone searching for our common ancestors.

Kindex provides one more very useful service . . . it is also very affordable off-site storage. Since I live in hurricane country, Kindex has also become part of my digital disaster plan.