county and city fields
working on Virginia Marriages https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/777db96e-6ced-4ca7-8596-00f7a77bb3b4. when I know the city is in Southhampton but only the city name is listed, do I mark the county field blank or do I put in Southampton?
Best Answers
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@LarryClark43 Welcome to Indexing! I would say that the field help should be followed in the case of the "Marriage County" field. Field helps give us more instructions on top of the project instructions. They are accessed by clicking on the purple question mark that appears when we click on a field.
The field help says: Index the marriage county from the "Marriage Place" column for each couple. So, if there is no county recorded in the Marriage Place column, I would not index the county name from the header of the record or from common knowledge. We only index exactly what they tell us to in the instructions and field helps. (It is kind of hard to get used to this especially when you feel like you want to provide as much information as possible.)
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@LarryClark43 You are quite welcome. I started indexing in 2013 and had a million questions and a couple of nice people who answered them. There is no book to read on how this all works and sometimes the project instructions and examples don't make a lot of sense, but, eventually they kind of do. Keep asking questions!
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Answers
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In Project Instructions, What to Remember About this Project, bullet point 4 it says: Index the marriage license city and county from the header of the record and the marriage city and county from the "Marriage Place" column for each couple. If the marriage place or marriage license place was not clearly indicated as city or county, please index the place in the county field. Do not index places of residence, churches, stores, or other localities in this field.
You can also check 'field help' when your curser is in the city or county data field for more specific instructions.
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I think you are doing a phenomenal job just the way you have indexed these - and you even put in the punctuation in the names and places. You only index what is in the column, so you are correct to only index Courtland in the Marriage City and mark the County <blank>. Superb work!
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The cities are followed by va. the counties are followed by Co. so the difference is indicated. It is common knowledge that court land Va. is in Southampton county, so the question is do I also index Southampton in the county field? I am new at this and the instructions don't make that clear to me. Sorry
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I appreciate all of your comments and patience as I struggle to learn how all of this works.
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