South Africa Anglican Church parish registers
Hi
Is it possible to be assigned to index a particular set of parish records?
Answers
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The projects are loaded in parts a, b, c etc. Each part contains one or more parishes for a particular timeframe. When indexing or reviewing, you retrieve the next available batch, for that particular project, which is random. So in short no, you cannot choose. If you are familiar with South African records and the project instructions, then my advice is to index whichever record batch comes up. At least that way, it is one less record that can be messed up by people who insist on doing SA projects when they are not familiar with names and places...
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Thanks for the info.
I do know SA and SA families very well, and I spend far too much time correcting records as I use them. I agree with your comments about the poor quality of indexing. Apart from gross inaccuracies in transcribing what is on the record, we are completely losing history when placenames are used that are inaccurate for the dates on the record. Who has the admin rights to update/change/automate place-names?
There seems to be a problem with the quality checking - can the SA moderator be appraised of this?
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Unfortunately we are all up the creek in the same boat with no captain and no oars! There is no SA moderator. We have our SA indexing group on FS and FB, currently there are only 30 people actively indexing and reviewing. Given there is 400 years of records, it is a big ask for us. obviously we cant get to all the records or fast enough. FS keeps overloading SA projects faster than we can get through them. There are 2 problems with SA records 1) South Africans do not want to take ownership of their records, they all want to harvest, but nobody wants to sow - ie everyone is searching, but too few people want to get involved in indexing/reviewing, so the void is filled by overeager foreigners who dont know names/places and have never stepped foot in the country, all they have is a FS login which gives them free range to index what they wish, how they want. 2) The placename fiasco is self inflicted by FS, who take what has been indexed, and prepublication attempt to "standardise" the place to their faulty database, in so doing they overwrite it to random places around the world that happen to have a string of similar letters, or with wrong province names vs the historical timeframe of the actual record. You will tell this by looking at what the indexer has done, shown as placename (original); and the overwritten standardisation shown as placename. It has got to the stage the best we can hope for is an accurate spelling of peoples names and surnames, so the record can at least be found. The placename search has been rendered completely useless now.
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