Indexing - United States—Enlisted and Officer Muster Rolls and Rosters, 1916–1939 [Part L] [M3X8-R65

kayleighmiller

I see there is more info on the pages that would be relevant to any searches.

I.E the Enlistment numbers of the Officers. The form is asking for dates etc when this page does not contain such info.

Is there a way to add a new field to a form, such as the Officers number and rank, rather than date of enlistment etc to help add as much relevant searchable info to each person?

Thanks

Melissa S Himes

Hi Kayleigh. There is no way to add any fields to the forms. The forms have been designed in conjunction with the project managers and the owners of the records. We really can't search on much more than a name and a date in FamilySearch, so the rank and serial number wouldn't be too helpful. Once a researcher finds the person on a search of their name, they will be able to see the image or at least the index of the information you have entered. I see this project does say "The completed index and images may have restrictions." So, the chances are pretty good, in my opinion, that these records probably belong to a subscription site like Fold3. But, I'm just another volunteer, so I could be wrong about that.

kayleighmiller

Thanks so much for this reply. Very helpful. Im an IT systems Engineer by trade so i think my brain just took over on the data side on what we could contain here as all data is searchable, but your reasoning is totally valid and i semi agree.

I have always believed having more info is more helpful when searching databases full of info on certain people/subjects etc. The more data the more easily located and matched with certain criteria set out by the searcher.

However im just glad to be helping with such an amazing data collection in an area i love. So thank you once again for your reply Melissa!

Kindest regards,

Kayleigh

Melissa S Himes

Thanks Kayleigh. The first thing to remember when indexing is to forget everything you know. I am a retired medical researcher and had created hundreds of data collection forms, and extracted and analyzed data from millions of patient records over my career. It was really difficult in the beginning to index and try to understand why the projects were set up like they were. Once I was able to clear my brain, pretending that it was a blank slate that held only the project instructions and field helps, it all made sense. I've been indexing for 8 years and find it very relaxing compared to my job. I hope you do too! You might also enjoy reading some of the papers of the BYU Computer Science dept on the subject of crowd-sourcing and AI. They are definitely world-leaders in the field.