Apostrophe in surname

TaylorWally

The batch I'm reviewing won't accept an apostrophe in the surname field. The surname involved is O'Conner. Batch ID is M9LY-61V. I'm going on for now, unless someone has a fix.

Incidentally, the link in the project instructions for Basic Indexing Guidelines (https://familysearch.org/ask/salesforce/viewArticle?urlname=Basic-Indexing-Guidelines-1381813432182&lang=en) seems to be broken lately. I've tried it in several batches.

DavidBeck1

Hello @TaylorWally

I replicated your issue in a new Batch, entering the name O'Connor in the Surname Field, but no error was indicated!

So, with this being the predicament, I have asked our Indexing Advisor to take a look at your query. Hopefully, you will have a more authoritative answer soon.

Cheerio for now!

John Empoliti

@TaylorWally

This “Surname field won’t accept apostrophe” issue plagues even some projects that make a specific point of instructing the Indexer not to put a space between the apostrophe and adjacent characters. For example, they want O’Connor and not O ‘ Connor. So, I consider it a bug. Until FS fixes it, I would either index, in this case, for example, OConnor. But O Connor would be OK too as far as our Reviewing System is concerned. Inserting or removing a space does not count as an error. I suspect that the data owners (and their software) want the apostrophe to be (with no adjacent spaces) there or the instruction wouldn’t have been given. So FS should fix this.

The Basic Indexing Guidelines (BIG) don’t exist anymore. On most projects these days they have been replaced by the General Indexing Guidelines (GIG) as the third section of the Project Instructions, either in expanded or “link” format. In “link” format they look something like what I’ve pasted below. I don’t know why not all Project Instructions have the same third section, e.g., what is below. I think they should.

• General Indexing Guidelines
• Given Names
• Alias Names
• Surnames
• How to Index Individuals Whose Names Were Not Fully Recorded
• Place-Names
• Indexing Dates
• Handwriting Help
• Diacritics and Other Characters
• Unreadable Information
• Crossed-Out, Corrected, Canceled, or Void Information
• Overlays
• Number of Entries per Image
• What to Do When Records Span 2 Images or to View Additional Images
• Ditto Marks
• Duplicate Images
• Brightness and Contrast
• Using the Ruler
• Rotating an Image

WPBA

Unfortunately the batch you were reviewing M9LY-61V has been submitted so we could not look at the actual batch to see what the problem was. If you come across it again let us know and we can look at the actual batch and report the problem on.

TaylorWally

Thanks to all of you for taking the time to respond and educate me.