Indexing French Records: let us index the Witnesses, their age, residence, occupation, relation

LegacyUser

Mariah Christine Wilson said: French records always include 2-3 witnesses. They are always named at the beginning of each entry with ages, residence, occupation, and sometimes relation to the deceased/married/birth. (I've been looking through many at Filae.com--the best place for French records!) If the deceased dies in a hospital, there sometimes is no information on family members, but the witnesses are still described. This would be a fabulous resource as we need more records!

In the next indexing update, please consider letting us index more of the information in [French] documents.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

A year or two ago, I requested that we be able to add participants in an event to the index. This is done for obituaries, but that is produced by machine.

The reason I made the request is that when we were in the Lincoln County, Tennessee, courthouse looking at the early records, the name of one person kept coming up with respect to several different events. Everything from births, marriages, and deaths were involved, along with wills. He had the same surname as her family members and eventually, my wife identified him (he had a unique name) and his place in her family.

Godparents, attending physician or midwife at a birth, attending physician at a death, officiating minister or Justice of the Peach at weddings, were all areas where it would be nice to have those additional people identified and on their profile, show where they played an important part in the lives of their families. Informants on death certificates and (I can't remember the terminology that is used) those certifying a delayed birth certificate (usually a member of the person's family) are two more areas.

When I suggested that, there were complaints about too many sources as it is, but in my opinion, this is still part of those persons' histories. Maybe sourcing needs to be expanded to include a separate page (or area) for these kinds of source entries, and that includes the obituaries that already have these indexed.

Will it slow down the indexing process? I don't see where it would not slow it down, so now that we have a limited ability to edit indexes, having the ability to add fields and names to the existing indexes would be satisfactory for me.

As far as the language is concerned, it really is dependent upon the record. If the information about other participants, then we should be able to index it, or at least have the option to add it to an existing index.