welsh language cues
Indexing in 1500's I am confronted with writing that is clean and tidy and very hard to decifer simply because the writer used different symbols for the letter- example H looks like a snake crawling through a fence-- As if that were not enough, the language is often not English or Latin but [I assume because of the frequency of y's and m's and L's --Welsh. I am sure somebody [probably located in Wales] would be better at indexing this record than I am. Can you either sort them according to language or perhaps off a tutorial in reading the language?
Answers
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Can you share your batch number, please?
Indexing batches are searchable by language when you are selecting a project. The only project for the UK currently showing on my list is from Cumberland.
There could be batches I am unable to see because some projects are restricted for indexing by specific groups.
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Welsh is not among the choices anywhere on FamilySearch. In the balance between precision and ease of use, it was apparently deemed to be too minor. (I don't envy the people who are tasked with those decisions; I'm just glad they've added Hungarian to all of the lists. When the web-based indexing platform was new, we spent some time filed under Russian, of all things. I'm sorry, I don't read Cyrillic.)
I am (strongly) of the opinion that indexing by people who don't know the language does more harm than good. When I work on the Slovakia Church Books project, it sometimes feels like I spend more time returning batches and fetching new ones than I do on actual indexing, because while I can and do index in three of the project's possible languages (Hungarian, Latin, and [God help me] German), it seems to inevitably give me pages that are in Slovak or written in Cyrillic letters.
I know that returning a batch for someone else to do is not necessarily going to result in a better index of that batch, because not everyone shares my philosophy. Many indexers will happily wade through a language they don't know, believing themselves to be doing helpful work when they index a child's name as Todtgeboren, or a father as Pater Ignotus. I just never want to be that indexer (even if he is, inevitably, nameless).
It would be good if there were some way of communicating to the system and/or other indexers why one is returning a batch: "This page is in [language]" or "This page is in a secretary hand that I am not familiar with" -- and then for the system to somehow make those batches available to choose by indexers who are familiar with [language] or are good with secretary hands. I have no clue how such a feature could be implemented.
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