Is there a list of which records have been indexed?
When researching, I often have to read parish registers page by page for many years to find an ancestor. Is there a way to see which records have been indexed, so time is not needlessly spent examining records that have already been indexed?
Answers
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It's not as easy as it once was. The Catalog was locked (not updated) about 3 years ago. Before then, it was relatively easy to see which films had been indexed. Many records have been indexed in the intervening 3 years but won't show as indexed in the Catalog.
You can use the Catalog as a starting point: anything showing as searchable, with a magnifying glass icon, is at least partially indexed. And, you can also do a search by name in the specific collection to check if it is indexed.
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I don't know of a list, but there are ways to figure it out for a particular image group.
If the index is older than about three years, then the catalog will have a magnifying-glass icon for the film. Of course, this doesn't tell you which pages are indexed, just that some images in that group have index entries associated with them.
If the catalog doesn't have the icon, then either it's not yet indexed, or the associated indexes were published more recently than the catalog was last updated (about three years ago now). One way to find out if the latter holds is to copy the film/image group number and plug it into the corresponding field under Search - Records.
A quick way to find out if there are index entries associated with an image is to use the older image viewer on it. (You can get to that from the newer viewer by deleting the question mark and everything after it from the URL.) If the normally-blue "Attach to Family Tree" button is grayed out, then yes, there are index entries.
Of course, the converse doesn't necessarily hold: sometimes, the index-to-image associations are a bit wonky, especially when it's an old index (such as the IGI). I've seen cases where an index detail page links nicely to the image, but the image says "not indexed".
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One thing to keep in mind is that if there is a magnifying glass icon, all it means is that something on the film has been indexed. If there are several items on the film, the indexed records may be in respect of a different item on the film, and your item of interest may not have been indexed at all, even if the magnifying glass icon is showing.
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