Indexing

RoyWhatley

I have been indexing Virginia marriages and I have to repeat the same city or county names in every entry. Is there some way to make these fields autofill similar to the way the surnames autofill?

Melissa S Himes

Hi Roy! The easiest way to repeat the city and county names is to use the Copy Text from the selected field into all following matching fields tool. It is the 6th icon from the right.

To use this, type the information in the first entry. Put your cursor in the field and select it, turning the field outline to blue, then click on that 6th icon. It will fill in all the matching fields.

The only thing to watch out for is when you have to delete extra entries. You will have to be sure that all of the entries are blank or empty to delete them. Again, once you have indexed all the information, if you have some extra entries with information you can just delete the entry, highlight the now blank field, and copy that forward.

RoyWhatley

Thanks, that will help tremendously.

The State of Virginia has what they call independent cities. The headings on the documents state whether it is a city or county register. I have been entering just the city in those cases and not a county. I assume that the independent city is responsible for the maintenance of the legal actions taken that city. I check this information on Wikipedia. However, if the heading on the document states that it is for a county, then I use that as my guide for the issuing authority. Any comments?

Melissa S Himes

Hi Roy. Virginia gets a little messy with her independent cities on all projects. This one gives us very clear instructions about how to index these fields. In cases where the document states whether it is a city or a county register, then we can use that information to determine where to place that information. However, it becomes problematic when that information isn't in the header, or the original scribe didn't cross out either the word city or county leaving us to wonder which it is.

The field helps for the places address the situation and when the document doesn't state whether the place is a city or a county, we index the place in the county field.

Marriage License City field help:

If the marriage license place was not clearly indicated as city or county, please index the place in the county field.

Marriage License County field help then verifies this:

If the marriage license place was not clearly indicated as city or county, please index the place in this field.

The same field help is found for the Marriage City and County entries.

I'll share a batch that I am going to be reviewing where the indexer did not follow the field helps for Roanoke and also did not follow the field helps for the Wife's Race. "If only 1 color or race column or pair of columns was listed but was not clearly indicated as either the husband’s or the wife's color or race, index the color or race in the Husband's Color or Race field, not in the Wife's Color or Race field."

In this batch I will globally change Roanoke from the Marriage City to the Marriage County because it isn't stated whether it is a city or a county.

Then I will globally change the wife's race to <blank>, even though I know that based on the timing the records and the laws of Virginia only one race column would have been needed for both parties. But, as indexers and reviewers we have to follow the project instructions and the field helps and not rely on our acquired knowledge or outside sources to transcribe these historic records.

https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/5be209d6-2764-4441-b3a5-0e6d8978b2c2

M3WV-QRX

Hope that all makes sense and is helpful!

RoyWhatley

Thanks , that helps. Richmond is an independent city and a separate county . I'll let ya'll keep that straight.