Reviewing City Directories: Names extracted from Companies and Female Widows
During the reviewing of City Directories, I continue to come across indexed names that have come from companies, organizations, civic groups, etc. Also, deceased males of female widows are also indexed often.
Is there a way for visual examples of common index mistakes can be part of the the "Project Instructions - What to Index?" ? It would save time for both indexers and reviewers.
On the same subject, is there a reason why individuals listed under company names are not indexed? I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to find out that my ancestor was part of a particular organization or company?"
Thank you for this forum. Carol
Answers
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If indexers aren't reading the project instructions so that they index husbands of widows and officers of companies, then they wouldn't see the part of the instructions that give the common mistakes. Also, those officers of companies will have their own individual listings in the directories where they're residents. Those individual listings give where they work.
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As barbaragailsmith said, people wouldn't see any additional examples, since they're clearly not looking at any of the instructions.
There's an additional problem with negative examples: people will miss or forget the negation, and therefore start doing exactly what the example was trying to tell them not to do.
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Widow names should be indexed. Why aren't they? I don't have any reason why they are not. I worked for FHL for 25 years and was on committees that developed template fields for indexing (called extraction then). We always indexed widow names. It's an important element when doing genealogical research.
Can any of you explain this .
David L. Grundvig
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