Thoughts on FamilySearch indexing and Get Involved

@MandyShaw1

I have looked over your analysis of this record. I hope I have understood you properly and will try to share with you my analysis, what is happening here, and how you can work around incorrect highlights. 

“Clicking into the image gives this:” Your link takes me to the review panel on the right, also known as the Family Review Tool, which has an editing tool built in. The record with highlights is on the left. With the editing tool, you can edit the record from here. For example, if I wanted to edit “Relationships,” I would click the editing pencil, which gives me the option to “Add More Information,” or I could click “Edit” under a name.  I clicked on the edit for María Efigenia, from there I can edit or add more information. I can also edit the highlights: if I see that one needs to be detached, I can detach it, and the same for attaching. But in the editing panel for María Efigenia, I see a highlight for her, even though when the primary person, Josefa Bacilia, is clicked, there isn’t a highlight for her.  She is still in the record, and when you click on her name, there is a highlight for her.  

The month “Marzo” is highlighted, which could have been because someone added a highlight when entering the date for the christening. 

I have learned not to pay so much attention to the highlights in Family Indexing Review. You mentioned that when you clicked on Josefa Bacilia on the right-hand side, it took you back to what I see as the start of the review panel (see above).  From that Review Panel, you can click on Josefa Bacilia,

and it will take you to the Main Family Search Editing Tool. You can edit from there as well, but as long as that looks correct, you don’t have to worry about what was highlighted and what wasn't. This will be the transcribed record.  In my opinion, this is not a bug.

@MandyShaw1

Feedback is critical to the success and improvement of FamilySearch. The feedback reports go directly to the engineers, and they read them all. If you see changes in FamilySearch, it is very likely that they were made because someone "Suggested an Idea" or gave "feedback." It does, however, take time to make the necessary changes in technology. Thank you for your willingness to give feedback. I know that Family Indexing Review can be complicated. I think it is a good idea to give feedback every time we use it. I know you already know about feedback, but I am going to post a link to a help article to encourage others to use the feedback function.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-give-feedback-to-familysearch

@Mary Rice

We discussed these Registers in our team meeting this week. Apparently, there is supposed to be one Primary person per record. So, in these registers, it looks like you would have to make a separate record for each person on the list. Research is underway to help us determine what to do with these registers. We are trying to determine how they were processed and what the workflow should look like when we review the names and transcribe the record. The previous registers you have brought to our attention, providing the image # and the DGS, have been most helpful. Thank you for that. As soon as we get the information, we will pass it on.

@MandyShaw1 - my distinct impression is that book indexes were generally not indexed in the past. Assuming successful indexing, what would be the point of indexing the internal paper index as the actual events would be indexed anyway?

Any use of the internal paper index for cross checking sounds reasonable but not at the expense of confusing the actual event indexing.

Where it does get tricky is if the paper index is referring to events wholly or partly in other books, which might or might not be digitised - in such cases, all bets are off!

@Mary Rice

We don't always find a family relationship in the records. There are other relationships to consider. For example, in a slave situation, the family is not mentioned. However, there is a relationship with the slave owner. Orphans in an orphanage are another example, where there are no family ties, but there are relationships with guardians and caregivers. These relationships with people other than family can sometimes help people find their families for the slave or other situation. Associations with people and places where they live are important information in a search for family ties. The human family can be messy.

@dancingintherain said

… We don't always find a family relationship in the records. There are other relationships to consider. For example …

I agree. But for the sake of completeness, I would add that a list of names may not have any relationships and may not even have any genealogical significance. For instance, as I indicated above, lots of volumes contain paper based indexes at the start or end. Where the paper based index entries point to events within the same physical volume, the usual course of action in the past was to index the events and ignore the paper based indexes - the paper index, after all, only fulfilled the same function as the FS index does now.

In the case of that image 10 identified by @MandyShaw1, there is an entry for "Iglesia, Otero Carlos B" with a number 13. This looks like a paper index and sure enough, image 30 further along includes a baptism(?) for "Iglesia (or Iglesias? AB), Otero Carlos Borromeo", and the pair of pages is stamped "13". (Notice there is no certainty whether that "13" means a page or a baptism(?) number until you try it out!)

Based on that single entry, the image 10 is part of a paper index and can be ignored. However, as I indicated to Mandy, we have to be very sure that the paper based index is genuinely redundant - if it points to entries in other volumes which may, or may not, have been digitised yet, then my simplistic "ignore it" advice can be disastrous as those paper indexes may not be redundant.

I have seen both redundant internal indexes and very-much-not redundant indexes that pointed to volumes that haven't been filmed yet.

Good luck with sorting them out!