Monday, June 23, 2008

Adventures in FamilySearch Indexing - Week 48

What in the world was a doing yesterday that caused me not to work on FamilySearch Indexing? Well, for starters my daughter came over and we just got to talking and talking. Then the family had to watch the TV show about the girl with 8 limbs - TWICE! It think it was on National Geographics. Not exactly a Sunday afternoon activity but the family was together and that was nice.

The other thing going on was my computer was busy uploading all my data to Mozy. I had it set on the fastest setting and it was going a such at good clip that I hated to monkey with it. The Mozy tech was surprised at how fast my connection is. It should be finished tonight uploading everything. That was one of the bad things about moving over to a new computer - Mozy wouldn't recognize the new computer having the same info to backup. Mozy tried to help me fix that, and have it recognize it the same, but it didn't work. So, I am backing everything up again online. You just have to have a good backup plan in place.

I found out that Mozy is located in American Fork just a couple of minutes down the road. That might be why I have such a good connection to them. I sure hope we don't have a natural disaster that takes the both of us out. Then my backup plans would be toast. I just really like Mozy so I'm not sure what I might do, or if I will look at the competition. It just seems stupid to have the server I backup to in the same city that I live. They are suppose to be my big answer in any scenario. Well at least I have an off-site backup that's a plus.

When I signed onto FamilySearch Indexing tonight I found one edited message for us.
From: Headquarters
Subject: Semimonthly Message - edited
Date: 17 Jun 2008

"Would you like to choose what project you work on each time you index?"

Press the Download From...button at the top of the application's start page, choose the project you would like to work on, and click OK.

Birthplace Fields in the 1870 US Federal Census

Because the index should accurately reflect the record, please do not type United States in the Place of Birth: Country field unless it is actually written on the document. Do not assume countries base on cities or states.

Former German and Prussian states and provinces, such as Hesse-Nasau, Bavaria and Waurttemberg, are sometimes written in the place of birth column. Index these states (even though they are in a foreign country) in the Place of Birth: State or Territory field. A red wavy line will appear when you do this, but it is okay, the system is simply asking you to double-check your work because these locations are not in the lookup list.

Punctuation

In order to create consistency and to help with arbitration, please follow these guidelines for indexing punctuation:

  1. Do not type periods, commas, or semicolons after initials or abbreviations for either names or event places.
  2. Use the following punctuation when it is normally part of a name, place or phrase:

  • Hyphen. For example, in names such as Wilson-Gaston, or in a relationship such as daughter-in-law.
  • Apostrophe. For example, in a name such as O-Farrell.
Multiple-Image Batches

To browse through the images in a multiple-image batch, press the down arrow to go to the next image or the up arrow to go to the previous image. If there are multiple records per image, you will have to press the arrows a few times to get to the next or previous image.
I have been choosing which projects I wanted to work on for quit a while now. Since I've been working on the Louisiana 1850-1954 Death Certificates project I once again picked that.

I had quite a few infants and young children tonight in my first batch. Quite a few of people died from bronchial pneumonia and it was only October. I also had a young widow of 26, it made me wonder if any children where left orphans at her passing. That would just be so sad. Then about the last 5 records jumped to July, it made we wonder how the numbers could be so off to jump from October to July.

The first record on my second batch gave me trouble. The name said "infant of Willie Mae Cherry". How are you suppose to index that? I knew I couldn't put infant in there. I was going to index the name as Willie Mae Cherry and then I made out a faint "Dorothy Mae Cherry birth cert." That solved my problem.

I indexed 17 records in my first batch and 16 in my second batch. My total records indexed now are 7,726. It's been 48 weeks since I started indexing. I am almost at my 1 year mark - WAHOO! I know many have indexed lots more than me. One person is Sue Anne on Sue Anne's Thoughts she wrote an article about it. As of the end of May she had indexed 50,000 names. Great job Sue Anne. I don't know how long that took her but FamilySearch Indexing hasn't been around but a couple of years. Maybe in 6 years I can reach that mark!

Well it's now time for bed and so to bed must go I.

See ya tomorrow, for tomorrow is always another genealogy day!

1 comment:

Sue Anne said...

I started indexing around May 2007, when a sister on a mailing list I'm on mentioned it. I've indexed 26,363 names and arbitrated 31,309 names. Arbitration goes a lot quicker because ideally what you're doing is just choosing A or B and not doing any actual typing. I'm technically designated as one of our stake arbitrators, so when there are calls for arbitration (like the one that recently went out) I focus on the arbitration.

For the first several months, I was trying to average 100 names a day (I would do a lot of catch up on the weekend), so by the end of the year I had done between 15-20k names.

Due to lack of family records, I'm a bit stuck when it comes to doing my own family history work so I took this as my opportunity to really contribute to the cause.

I think it's great that you've made a commitment to do a little every week. If all the members who were on their computers regularly did the same thing, the amount of work that would get finished would be staggering.