US, Virginia—Birth Records, 1853–1900: localities and twins
I am working on this batch https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/7c4137f9-0b3c-4777-9d10-beaf09b05e35 in US, Virginia—Birth Records, 1853–1900. Many "Place of Birth" or "Place of Residence" are recorded as "near [a city]"; I am not sure if I mark the field as Blank or index that information.
Also: twins. There are two sets of twins in this ledger, both recorded on one line. I have split them into two entries; is that correct procedure? (One set is both male; the other set is a male and female which requires me to guess at which name goes with which gender.)
Best Answer
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Hi Kassie.
For the places that have descriptive words like "near", you would be correct to index only the city/town names. This instruction falls under General Indexing Guidelines:
Place-Names
- Do not include identifying descriptions or terms, such as “near,” “about,” “around,” “twp,” “township,” “city,” “county,” or “state,” with the place-name unless the term is normally used as part of the name (for example, Mexico City, Salt Lake City, or New York City).
- If there are multiple levels of localities, separate geographical localities, from smallest to largest, with a comma.
For the twins, the instructions say: Index information about twins or other multiple births as separate entries, even if they were recorded on a single document. So you are correct!
You could make the Child's Sex field blank for the boy and the girl, and then not have to worry about guessing.
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Answers
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@Kassie Moore I would like to invite you to join the Indexing Chat Community. They have indexers there can assist you with your questions. I have included a link to this group in this message.
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