Indexing multiple images or partial images for a single person

TCLewis

Good afternoon,

I was reading some instructions and realized I may have been indexing some records wrong, and want to learn the best practice.

For example, if I have an image that is only a signature and name, I have been indexing only that information and marking all other information as .

Now today, I read in the General Indexing Guidelines that "If the first record on an image begins on a previous image, don't index it. The record will be indexed as part of the previous batch. Start indexing at the first complete record."

My question is about what to do with those partial images. Should I not index images of signature pages of multi-page records at all? Do I mark them as "No, Duplicate Image" or "No, No Extractable Data"? Or perhaps should I mark it as "Yes" and then mark all the fields as blank instead?

For reference, I have included a screenshot of the type of record I am asking about. Here, I have only the petitioner's signature and a date. However, this petitioner is the same person on image 1 of 2. What is the best way to classify this image?

Thanks for any guidance

erutherford

This is an Oath of Allegiance. This images does not start on the previous image; the Oath is its own stand-alone document and is indexed as such.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

As erutherford says, your example doesn't illustrate what you're asking about. The naturalizations are kind of their own beast: you have to pay close attention to the "what to index" list to determine not only whether a particular page is to be indexed, but also what pages (or parts of pages) count as separate documents.

In general, the idea is to index all entries that begin in your batch, even if this means consulting the reference images to get the end of an entry.

As an example, for approximately the first decade of Hungarian civil registration, the marriage records were on the front and back of a page, and for the first two years of that span, they had the mother of the bride (along with the witnesses and signatures) on the back. This means that every image from those registers has the end of one entry followed by the beginning of the next, and the early ones have information to be indexed on the following image.

The indexing batches for this project consist of a single image, so if I were indexing this, I'd have a single entry, and I'd need to consult the +1 reference image to get the bride's mother's name. (Unless the page was refilmed, in which case the name might be on the +2 or even +3 reference image.)