Bahamas ideas

Bonnie Cresap

I have several suggestions to improve the quality of indexing of Bahamian records:

1. There needs to be a standard location for Fortune Island. Many folks got married there, so there are lots of records. I can see not standardizing every church or parish, but it would be helpful to have the general location on the standard list. Otherwise, they're getting listed as generic Bahamas, or accidentally to the Philippines.
2. The handwriting of the many clerks who recorded births and deaths and marriages is not quite the same as current cursive or printed English, leading to odd indexing. Here are three problems I've seen often:
   1. Very fancy 'x', as in Exuma or Delavaux, is interpreted as 'sc', leading to Escuma and Delavausc.
   2. Many times 'n' is indistinguishable from 'u', leading to Acklius Islaud, and many misspelled names.
   3. Occasionally a double 's' is written like a loopy 'p', along the lines of the German ß, causing some of the numerous Moss family to be indexed as Mop, and I believe I saw something like Nicholass turned into Nicholap, although I can't find it right now.
   4. I don't exactly know how to screen for these oddities, but it might be helpful to warn indexers about them.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

For your first item, you can make suggestions for additions and improvements to the Places database using the Places tool (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20). Mr. Google claims that Fortune Island is another name for Long Cay and/or Albert Town on Acklins and Crooked Islands (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?searchTypeaheadInputText=Albert%20Town&text=Albert%20Town&focusedId=1916377); if that's correct, then I suggest using the "Improve This Place" button to suggest the alternate name. If that's not where it is, and the correct location isn't in the database by some other name, then you can use the "Suggest A New Place" link at the top left instead. (Either way, it'd be good to find a link supporting the name/location.)

The rest of your items are not at all unique to the Bahamas. In particular, 'n' versus 'u' is basically a universal problem; there were some handwriting styles that put a loopy thing or line above the 'u' to help distinguish between them, but it's not much of a help, because people forgot it about half the time, and used similar markings to indicate abbreviations (such as n̄ to indicate 'nn') or diacritics (such as ñ).