Indexing the Church Clergy in addition to Family Members in Family Indexing Review [FIR]
@dancingintherain and others, I'm wondering why we are indexing/reviewing the names of the clergy such as the Priests doing the baptisms and the Monsignors who sign the Registration of the Baptisms in addition to the Family Names?
So this is the indexed record that I did of a baptism in Puerto Rico. I accidentally cut off the Primary person's name of Juan. The two people at the bottom Mons. Pablo Claudio Rivera and the Priest doing the Baptism José J. Nin. They are highlighted as names to be recorded and in FS they are just listed at the bottom as seen here. How is a researcher to tell that this is not a family member AND why are we including those names at all? I am not interested in who the clergy were when I am searching for ancestors.
Answers
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@Mary Rice This is a very good question. I imagine that if I were to find a baptism record without mention of the clergy who performed the baptism and a witness's signature, I might question its legitimacy. I believe this shows the importance and good practice in reviewing not only the indexed record, but also the original image. This indexed record also includes other people unrelated to the primary person. In reviewing the original record, we can see what role these people played in this baptism and in the primary person's life. Another reason I thought of is that every person on a record is significant. When the record is digitized and indexed, every person on the record becomes searchable. Even the clergy might have family members searching for him. I remember finding an ancestor on a census record listed as a boarder; the same argument could be made for why we would include a boarder on a census record. Just being on a record can provide useful information in searching for a person.
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@dancingintherain Thanks for your answer. I'm still not convinced unless there's a way to signify who the extra people are. In this case I did not index their titles of Mons. and PBRO (Presbitero in Catholic Records). I will start including their titles as otherwise researchers will just assume they are a witness like a neighbor. I have to say I have never found a record in my own searches that included these people.
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Indexing all names may help someone find a relative. I wouldn't want to leave anyone out.
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@dancingintherain Is there a specific type of metadata allowed for in this collection where clergy may be noted?
Each name present should have a metadata type (principal, mother, father, godparent, officiant, 'other' might be examples), although the only non-principals I can see on a quick Historical Records search of this collection are Mothers. The answer to this point will tell us whether clergy should be included or not.
I don't personally see how indexing can be reviewed accurately if the reviewer doesn't know what the valid metadata looks like - I am sure the old manual indexing process was clear on this.
The existing indexing I saw in this collection looked pretty perfunctory, see e.g. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6DR2-YWXR?lang=en for a particularly egregious example.
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I seriously do not understand why FS should include the clergy as personas in the index records.
People say things like "… Indexing all names may help someone find a relative …" This misses the point that any clergyman will already appear in censuses, in their own vital records, etc. Creating index entries for every single baptism that they took, will result in a massive amount of extra data for each clergyman that won't add anything useful to their information. I know - I've been there with a clergyman distantly related by marriage and a search on his name (in newspapers actually, rather than parish registers, but the volume is similar) results in page after page of weekly reports stating that he's conducting a service. That's not what I'm after - I wanted his genealogical information. This volume of service related data is too big to deal with.
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@Adrian Bruce1 Thank you for you comment as I agree with what you say. In addition, after having done tens of thousands of church records including baptisms in England and South Africa, not one included the clergy. Sometimes the Project Instructions stated that the owners of the records specifically asked for certain names, dates, places or other data to be included as FamilySearch was helping them also by indexing their records. Another concern I had in doing these Baptisms in Family Indexing Review is that the AI program was better at identifying the names of the clergy than of the Primary Persons which were often identified as UNKNOWN. This is disturbing and silly as the PP names were easily distinguishable in the records. How is AI helping when it cannot easily identify the PP and family members?
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The screenshot below shows what is commonly given as "Is this record primarily about ?" So AI is telling us that it cannot identify which of these four baptisms the record is about. This is very discouraging. Although the PP is easily identifiable because their name is written in the left margin in addition to the body of the baptism record. "Unknown" could mean the first, second, third, or fourth record because sometimes one or more of these records could already have been reviewed. So if I feel like having a time-consuming challenge I will try each of the PP names until I find the one whose family members or clergy are listed to the right, after I've guessed the name of the PP.
This is so inefficient compared to manual reviewing and more time consuming for the reviewer. Often I spend 30-45 minutes on One record because some of AI's identified family members or "others" are incorrect or "Linked Names" will not allow me to correctly enter names.
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@MandyShaw1 @Mary Rice AI is still in its early stages and has to be taught; it is still evolving. The only way we can get it to behave and become truly useful is to use it. I’m thankful for engineers who are working hard on programming, in hopes that one day AI will do exactly what we want it to. Your questions and comments are taken seriously and are helpful in the process. You are welcome to suggest an idea.
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@dancingintherain My question is not in any way about the use of AI, it is about how this Record collection's metadata is structured and thus what metadata elements should/can be indexed on this record (and thus can eventually be displayed meaningfully to the Historical Records user, and/or searched for). So all I'm asking you to do, please, is to ask the relevant team to make this collection's metadata structure available to you, to pass on to the reviewers who are trying to make sense of the relevant AI-generated index information.
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@MandyShaw1 @Mary Rice @Adrian Bruce1 Your concerns and questions will be taken to our team meeting this week.
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