Duplicates
I was surprised today when I checked today to see whether a record I was inputting already had some info in family search. The exact record that I was working on had already been indexed. It was for Matilda S Hart, b 23 Jan 1896, Isle of Wight, Virginia. I looked at the source record, and it was exactly the same one I was doing. Does this happen often, that an indexing record has already been indexed?
Answers
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Many record sets have been indexed more than once. Sometimes, more information is being captured. Sometimes, there has been a re-filming. There are other reasons, including projects that FamilySearch indexes for other organizations.
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Motivationally, it was nice to think that I was helping to make salvation available to deceased persons who hadn't already had the opportunity. I indexed 20K + names this year based on that. Now it appears that much of that work was redundant, and I'm doubtful that it's going to help anyone much. Maybe if the information about the purpose of the project was included with the project, it would help volunteers make informed choices. It's not clear why redundancy would be necessary when indexing for other organizations, since the information is already digital and easily merged and or extracted. But thank you for the helpful information.
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The records available on FamilySearch are used by many people who are not LDS and who have an interest in our family history. A new indexing project may capture important details that were not included in the original project - image numbers or certificate numbers to make it easier to find the image, for example.
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