Indexing city dirctories
City directories; We continue to have fields for prefixes and suffixes. I continue to ask W H Y ??
Why not incorporate that with the surname, rather than a seperate field.. The percentage these fields are used is extremely low.
City Directories; I think it would be benefical to list the occupation and /or employer.
It may help to identify our families,, but also just general information. I find it interesting. Anybody can do a pedigree on a Angus bull,,, Her is an wealth of information over and above a pedigree. Yes, I know, investigators can find this info if they search enough,,,, but it is right in front of us indexers,, and we are not using it !!! Just my opinion .. Donald Robinson95
Best Answer
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Why? It's because what the record administrators (not Family Search) want. Occupations, employers and addresses in have never been indexed any project. Ever. And it will likely never happen. If you don't like what the rules are, don't index.
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Answers
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Remember that an index is not a transcription, and it is not meant as a replacement for the document itself. It is only a finding aid. The reason things like occupations and employers aren't indexed is that they're not really useful for finding entries, so the time they would add to the completion of the index would not be worth it.
The "finding aid only" characterization is especially important for the city directories: if there are three entries for John J. Smith, differing only in address, occupation, or other not-indexed details, then the instructions call for only indexing one of them. There do not need to be three identical entries in the index in order for researchers to find the three different men in the directory.
I'm not sure why the prefix and suffix fields are included, but I suspect it's to make it easier to find women who are listed under only their husbands' names (Mrs. John J. Smith), and multiple generations of men with the same name (John J. Smith Sr. and Jr.). I think that the people setting up this project believed that directories use such prefixes and suffixes more often than other types of documents.
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I haven't seen a suffix field for any City Directories project, just the prefix. But it looks like your prefix/suffix question has less to do with why the specific project does it and more why we don't just combine it with other fields.
But the thing is, FamilySearch has prefix and suffix boxes for names in the tree. That is what the computer will be comparing it against when it searches for record hints. If the computer doesn't think it matches, it won't be shown, even if the connection is obvious for a human.
I think Julia did a good job of explaining why the occupation doesn't need to be indexed—the index is not a record, it's a tool to find the record.
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Prefixes such as Mr, Miss, Mrs. are important for the time period too - during the18th, 19th and even 20th century(s) Mrs. gave women the distinction of being married, sometimes to very socially prominent men. Miss was used to indicate adult woman, never married; much the same as using Ms today, which generally means "none of your beeswax". Mr. used as in Mr. Francis Smith, means this man has a name often given to either sex. Given names like Shirley & Marion were often given to men just as they are to women, why I don't know.
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