Enable users to search by witnesses on Records
Something I find that would be really useful is being able to enter the name of someone and find documents which their names appear on as witnesses.
For Jamaican records birth and death records usually have one witness while marriage records have two. These witnesses are usually family (if not close friends) and being able to search what records they witness can help in locating other family members/ancestors.
Comments
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Generally I agree - it would be nice to have indexing produce a more complete/searchable transcription of the record.
But the indexing of records is governed by contract - so apparently most record custodians seemingly only want them searchable by the 'primary part(y/ies)'. Since the other person(s) are sometimes not identifiable I think excluding others is so that the searchable index databases are not 'larger' (yes I don't know particularly how another column or two would affect database size, etc.).
So what this means for the researcher: Produce and include your own transcription of the record (if only for preservation in your language) - and attach that in the Reasons for attaching/Notes - when linking the record with person(s) in the Tree. If other person(s) are identifiable - attach the Source to them as well.
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Yes, it would be useful to be able to find all of the baptisms where one's relative was a godparent, or all of the weddings where he was a witness, but indexing is a time-consuming endeavor. Adding more fields (names) to an index increases the time almost exponentially. This is why most indexes do not include these "peripheral" names.
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