I have a question about duplicate entries

rogerallanmiller1

rogerallanmiller1

OK , I will be upfront here. If anyone can understand what I am talking about (after reading this question), I am certain that you are blessed with the gift of understanding crazy indexers! I am working on US, New York, Albany—Indexes to Mortgages, 1630–1975[M35M-ZZ4]. While indexing I have noticed that there is almost duplicate entries where depending on the husband and wife name being in different places, the rest of the entry is the same. e.g.

Charles Ray , john smith, 1840, may, 10, 47, 155

Rose BLANK, john smith, 1840, may, 10, 47, 155

then further down in the batch the names are reversed because the alphabet changed. so now you have

the same thing but the wife is associated with the last name and the husbands last name is blank. eg

Rose Ray, john smith, 1840, may, 10, 47, 155

Charles BLANK, john smith, 1840, may, 10, 47, 155

It feels like I am duplicating a lot of information. I can see that we index a line at a time but where you can see that the wife last name is the same as the husband name later in the document, can you put the fist instance with the wife last name is the same as the husbands and then not index the second instance.

It seems like a have read in some batches of indexes you don't need to index duplicate entries but i couldn't find that working in the Project Instructions.

But if this makes sense to you , thanks and let me know what you think. I want to do it correctly but don't want to duplicate if its not necessary.

Thanks,

Al Miller

erutherford

We don't index exact duplicates. You would index all four of the examples because one has the spouse blank and the other one has the other spouse blank.

If it were Charles Ray, John Smith, 1840, May, 10, 47, 155 and Rose Ray, John Smith, 1840, May, 10, 47, 155, then the order of names flipped because of the alphabet, you would only index the first records because the information has already been recorded in the Charles Ray order.

rogerallanmiller1

Thanks that was helpful!

rogerallanmiller1

Thanks that was helpful!

slotbuddy

slotbuddy

I know I am entering this comment a bit late, but perhaps if you think of it in this way. If you were searching for this person and you only indexed the one spouse and not the other, you would never find them. That is the reason you try to index every name unless they are EXACT duplicates.

rogerallanmiller1

I do appreciate your response.