We need a Name tool for indexing

Walker, Jian Joseph

I'm not familiar with all of the possible names.

I think we would benefit from a tool where you can type in the names (or segments) from the indexing documents and it pulls up names that match the spelling. It would help also if you could filter the name suggestions by country.

This would help indexers/reviews determine what the document likely is based off of names that make sense.

This would also help with place names as well because the local language might not make sense to the indexer.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

There are various websites out there where you can explore given names, such as Behind the Name; I don't think FS's limited resources would be well-spent on such a tool.

Walker, Jian Joseph

Thank you Julia for sharing that resource. I understand the language, I just needed that resource to help hone down name possibilities.

MichaelBennett14

I often use Find-A-Grave for this purpose. It would be far better though, to have a tool on Family Search which (in response to a user's input) would list known surnames and given names of people along with a rough count of people having them. The pattern-matching feature (with wild-card support) would be nearly vital.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Repeating a part of my original comment that was removed: regarding the last sentence, about "the local language might not make sense to the indexer", I strongly believe that if the indexer is not familiar with the language of the document, then that indexer should not be indexing that document. If it's a multilingual indexing project (such as the Slovakia Church Books, which has records in at least five different languages and two and a half different alphabets*), you may need to return multiple batches before getting one that you can do -- but better to spend an entire indexing session returning batches than to do one in an unfamiliar language.

(*Regular [Latin] letters, Cyrillic, and That Dratted German Handwriting, which is technically Latin letters but has about as much in common with them as the Cyrillic does, so I count it as at least half of a different alphabet.)

For placenames, FamilySearch has the Places database (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20). Its search is kind of weird, though -- it may tell you "No Results to Show" when you're one letter short of an existing placename.

This makes it a less-than-ideal tool for deciphering placenames during indexing. Sometimes, you can supplement it by searching FS's Catalog instead, but that has its shortcomings, too: it only has places that have records associated with them, and its search is simplistic as well. (For example, if it's hyphenated in the catalog, then searching for the unhyphenated version will give no results.) This is why I have an entire folder of gazetteer bookmarks, along with links to several online map services -- and sometimes, I'm still stumped.

Given how complicated the maintenance and use of the existing places database gets, I stand by my earlier comment: FS's limited resources would not be well spent on databases of people's names. Yes, a well-made database of localized name information would be Very Handy in genealogy generally, not just during indexing, but it would take specialized knowledge and a very large investment of time and other resources. As the many (and justified) complaints about the name origins panel of the fluff page show, a half-hearted attempt would be worse than nothing.

dontiknowyou

FS's limited resources would not be well spent on databases of people's names.

I absolutely agree. Detangling personal names is a hugely complicated, specialized process in its own right. Prominent among devotees to this kind of work are several membership associations devoted to research, including the Guild of One Name Studies. Guild members devote considerable time to determining which of multitudes of spelling differences are transient deviants (ie, transcription errors, phonetic spellings, transliterations, etc.) and which are persisting variants.

Crucial to all of this is that indexing records what is in the historical record. Example: If a record says Jas or Wm, that's what should be indexed, not James or William.