Kansas census
Well, here's a new one! I opened a Kansas census batch today and in looking the document over in preparation for indexing the information, I noticed that the first three records were people carried over from the previous household on a previous page so I would not be indexing them.
However, all three persons, all young children, had the same sounding surname, but spelled three different ways. Out of curiosity, I opened the reference pages and went back to see if I could find the remainder of this family. I did, a married couple, both persons having the same sounding surname, but spelled two different ways. Five different spellings for the same surname for five different people within the same family! Somebody needed more coffee or something!
If the census takers in 1885 knew that someone sitting at a computer and connected to world 139 years after they filled out the census document was going to be looking at those census documents … I wonder if they would have paid more attention to what they were writing and how they were writing it??!
My afternoon laugh, y'all! If we can't have fun indexing, we need to calm down, relax and enjoy the history held within!
The Cemetery Tramp
Answers
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Where in the PI did you find the instruction not to index the first 3 records and why? Surely researchers or others reading the census would be curious enough to turn the page and look to be sure they had all members of the same family/household accounted for.
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In the PI, in What To Remember …, the sixth bullet reads:
- Some records may continue to or from another image and you may need to view another image to get information for the fields on the image you are indexing. See "What to Do When Records Span 2 Images or to View Additional Images" in the "General Indexing Guidelines" below.
In the PI, in GIG, under "What to Do When Records Span 2 Images … ". The instruction reads:
- 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.
- If the last record on an image continues to the next image, index the entire record, including what continues to the next image.
Is that not correct? My understanding is that means another indexer should record the entire household from the bottom of their page together, and that I am to record my batch, including names that carry to the next page from the last household.
If the instructions are wrong, that issue should be addressed immediately. I feel like every time I index a project and I have a question about something, I get called out for not reading the instructions and come to find out, I feel like I'm the only one who does read the instructions. I'm kind of beyond tired of it, actually.
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It depends on what's considered to be "one record": one person or one household? I believe for censuses, it's usually one person, but I haven't actually done a batch in one since … urk, whenever the 1940 census was done, over a decade ago.
It's definitely an area where the confusion is increased by FS's tendency toward overloading vocabulary (in this case, specifically the word "record").
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I phoned FS on this one and got both answers. And I, too have indexed many different projects over many years, more than a few of which were census pages. Maybe that's the question: what is a "record"? We don't index the household/record number in a census, only "Yes" or "No". The GIG also says "index what you see" and "don't index reference images because they are part of another batch." In my own family, there are 2 Alberts and 4 Walters all born to the same father in the same year. The keys here are the mother and the town and the fact that a couple of them died as infants and the dad liked the names Albert and Walter. None of that might be recorded (whoops there's that word again!) in a census taken on March 1st 1885, so yes, I would turn the page to see if there might be more household members. On the other hand, when FS says records maybe FS means records that continue on subsequent images within the batch you're working on. (forgive ending my sentence with a preposition 😉) And have a great day, I'm calling it quits for the night😊.
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