Why does it say, "For Reference Do Not Index"?
I was indexing marriage records from Zimbabwe and once I finished a page, I tried doing more but it said "For Reference Do Not Index". Do I stop what I am doing or other?
Zimbabwe—Gokwe, Church Records, 1954–2022
[MQXG-F2R]
Answers
-
I would think it's pretty self-explanatory that you only index the images that are in your batch, not the entire film starting from your batch.
For this project, the third sentence in the Project Description reads: "Individual batches contain a single image."
Perhaps you're confused because the project defaults to 30 entries, but you only have a tenth of that? That's also explained in the project instructions, in the What To Remember section: "Images may show multiple records. You may need to add or delete entries in the data entry area to index all of the records on a document or remove any unused entries. For more information, view the 'Number of Entries per Image' section in the 'General Indexing Guidelines.'" (Emphasis mine.)
The instructions for deleting the unneeded 27 entries are the second bullet point of the referenced "Number of Entries per Image" page: https://prod.familysearch.psdops.com/cmsa/idx/number-of-entries-per-image.
The explanation for why there are reference images is also in the general guidelines, under "What to Do When Records Span 2 Images". For example, if there's a format that uses both sides in a two-page spread, but the filming only did one side at a time, then indexing those images would involve using the reference images to get the information from the other side. This doesn't apply to this batch; the marriages on the other side are separate entries and will be indexed in their own batch. You can use the reference images to help decipher things -- such as by looking for examples of "Mary" or "William" to help determine whether a surname is "Mahler" or "Wahler", in this clerk's hand -- but you will not be indexing any information from them.
2
