City and Business Directories - Confirmation of Old Guidance
Review Batch URL: https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/be514bd9-ed85-450b-9c34-813e7d1542e5
Review Batch Name: US—City and Business Directories, 1749–1990 [Part C][M341-HMK]
I've paused my Review of this Batch to ask for an update or confirmation of prior FS guidance. Thank you.
MY Question/Request is: Moderators, please consult with the current Project Managers of the City and Business Directories Project to confirm whether guidance for earlier Parts of this Project (given a year or so ago) still applies. It has to do with how to index alternative spellings of surnames. (e.g., Reed, See also "Read" and "Reid"). Should this type of interjection (which is easy for Indexers to skip over) be ignored? Or should the Surname Reed be indexed as Reed or Read or Reid? FS told us then to treat them as "aliases" and use the OR construction. Not everyone liked it, but this was the "command decision" at the time.
Below are the details.
The list of names in this batch starts with the Surname Reed is the sentence: See also "Read" and "Reid" at the end of the list of individuals with Surname Reed.
Later, at the end of Surnames Reeder, we find: See also Rieder.
Likewise, for Reedy, we find: See also Reidy.
We - The Indexing Chat Group - encountered this type of construction in earlier Parts of this Project and asked for guidance from the Project Managers via Family Search Support. The direction was: Treat those See also names as aliases and so index, for example, the Surnames as Reed or Read or Reid instead of just Reed. Likewise, for the other instances of this type of instruction.
Answers
-
Thank you for your question. The good old indexing guidelines still apply: If alias names were included on a document, or if an individual's name was listed with various spellings on the document, include all variants, separating each with the word Or. For example, if a name was written as "Georgios (George), George Broski, George Browzowski, or George Brzozowski," index the name fields as follows:
- Given Name: Georgios Or George
- Surname: Broski Or Browzowski Or Brzozowski
1 -
I wish they would check with the project managers too, @John Empoliti and get an updated or definitive answer about this project. "See also" never meant those were variations of names in City Directories. It was used to guide the reader to look at other listings if they didn't find the individual in the listings.
If I were reviewing that batch, I would add one record with the Surname indexed. It serves the same purpose and gets the researcher to the image without creating 3 variations for 100's of names.
1 -
Hi Melissa. Really good point. That's exactly why I asked for confirmation the way that I did. It is clearly not the normal alias construction.
AND - Thinking about it at this moment, I think that the best and perhaps most correct Indexing action is to create an Entry for each of those sound-alikes with their respective Surname Fields filled accordingly (e.g. Read and also Reid) and <Blank> Given Names Fields. Thus, for example, create an Entry with SN = Read, GN = <Blank>, and one Entry with SN= Reid, GN = <Blank>. After all, those Surnames are mentioned, and so should be Indexed.
Doing so also means that a Researcher who searches on those Surname alternatives will be drawn to this image as well as the pages that are "home" to the actual Surnames Reid and Read. Of course, the Researcher will also be warned on those "home" pages for "Read" and "Reid" also to consider "Reed."
0
