What to do when you can't understand a specific text on a record?

LuiS_R

Say you're working on a record and have completed most of it, but for some reason don't understand a certain field, (e.g. scribbled or illegible) - what is the best practice for this? Would you put BLANK? or...?

Julia Szent-Györgyi

If this is regarding indexing, then (a) there's a category better suited to that, and (b) it'll depend rather highly on the specifics: is the field required or optional? Do the project instructions say anything about what to do with illegible text? FS's generic indexing instructions call for a question mark for a single unreadable character and an asterisk for multiple consecutive unreadable characters, or ctrl-U for an entire field that's unreadable. (I've never been able to figure out how to tell how many characters are unreadable. Often, the whole problem is seeing two characters as one or one character as two.)

Brett .

@LuiS_R

FYI

Welcome to the "Community.FamilySearch" Forum.

I am just another 'lowly' User/Patron ...

Just in passing ...

So that, we may better, be able to help/assist ...

Question: DOES that matter, that you raise, RELATE, to "Indexing"?

[ Or, something else ... ]

Please advise/clarify.

'Thank You', in advance.

Brett

LuiS_R

@Julia Szent-Györgyi

Thanks for your answer! Ah yes -- now that you mentioned that, I remember learning about that. That makes sense!