Don't get lost in the weeds

Here is today's helpful hint: Don't get lost in the weeds.

By that I mean, don't spend so much time on the little inconsistencies you find while you're searching and inputting. Data are dirty. Sometimes you'll find an individual, and all the information doesn't match with what you know about him or her. Look at the larger context. Does the information about the individual you've found generally match with what you know, but there is one wrong piece of information? Is most of the information wrong, but you haven't found anyone else with the right name or in the right location?

Here are some things to consider:

• Mistakes are sometimes made.
• There could be mistakes in the original documents
• There could be inputting mistakes
• Sometimes documents are difficult to read
• Sometimes the people providing the information made mistakes, couldn't remember, or lied (In our records, lying was most common when a person younger than 18 was trying to enlist to fight in the Civil War.)

Keep these thing in mind when you're searching. For example, you've found a soldier in the 1880 census. He's living with the spouse and children that the Mil Info says he should be living with. But his age is 10 years off. Is this your guy? It probably is.

A lot of this is common sense, and you'll get better at it with practice. If you're not sure, make a mental list of the evidence for and against this individual being a match. This might help you make the decision quickly.

Don't forget . . .

Please don't forget to check household 0. That means checking the inputting and the searching. Correct the mistakes you find.

Those of you who add items for me to fix on the VCC People to Be Deleted from Grid Google doc need to make sure you go back to the list and see if I did what you asked. Sometimes I have questions about your request. When that happens, I will highlight the line in pink and leave you a note in the Remark column. Please check this.

Correction

A couple of our inputters pointed out a mistake on the blog. It is corrected here.

Egregious errors on the census manuscript

Here's a reminder of what to do when there are egregious errors on the census manuscript.

If you find an egregious error on the manuscript, leave the field blank, and input the INCORRECT information in the Remarks field. You may do this for both AGE and GENDER. Here are a couple of examples.

Age: This is not for a difference of a few years. This is for situations when the manuscript says the individual is 7, but you know he is 80.

Gender: If the manuscript lists Elizabeth as a DAUGHTER and a MALE, then leave the Gender blank, and input the INCORRECT information in the Remarks.

If you're not sure, please ask your supervisor.

Leaving a field blank should be a last resort. Make sure you are correct before leaving a field blank.

The previous post said to enter the CORRECT information in the remarks. That is wrong. We write the incorrect information in the remark to preserve what the manuscript says without entering obviously wrong data in the fields.

Read me!

Please email me by the end of this week to let me know you've read this post. The first five inputters to email me will get to add 1/2 hour to their time sheets. All census inputters must send me an email.

Any of the new people (that is, those of you who are still being checked) who haven't emailed me to let me know you read the state codes list must do so by the end of the week. If you are unsure why you have to do this, please ask.

Quality code 2, checking, etc.

There seems to be some confusion about what constitutes a quality code 2.

Quality code 2 is name, age, and 2 other things from the following list:

• Living where expected (or adjacent county) near birth place, enlistment, marriage, or near previous known residence
• Matching skilled occupation
• Uncommon name
• Middle initial (and first name) match from what you know in mil info or previous QC1 or 2 census
• Matching birth place of child or parent,especially if other than the state where he is currently residing.
• You find the child of your veteran with a spouse for whom you have a marriage record without parents' names, but the marriage took place in county there the child was known to be living at the time.
• Birth month and year in 1900 census match to mil info or other good source.  (I would also count if the birth month matches exactly and the birth year given is within one year of the expected year of birth).

Make sure you review quality codes periodically.

Speaking of reviewing . . . Checkers, please go to the most recent version of the training manual and review the format for your check sheets. Please follow the format. One change from the format that is OK, is add a summary at the bottom of the major issues or improvements you noticed while checking.

Don't forget state codes. If you are still being checked, please read the list of state codes in your manual. You are still assuming you know them when you don't. Please email me to let me know you've read the codes. You might also want to review the blog post in which state codes were discussed.

On the whole, it looks like everyone is improving, and that's great.

Who to search for

There still seems to be some confusion about who you're supposed to search for and add to the grid. Here is the summary from the training manual.

• Search for the soldier, if the work has not been done or you find new information that could help you find him.
• Search for the soldier's death date and cause.
• Search for the soldier's spouse both after his death and before their marriage.
• Only search for the spouse if she had children with the soldier.
• If the spouse died or was divorced from the soldier without having children, DO NOT search for her.
• Search for the spouse's death date and cause.
• This is only for a spouse who had children with the soldier. If it comes up in the hints or in the soldier's information, please input it if she is already on the grid (because she was enumerated in the soldier's household). We just don't want you spending a lot of time on this.
• Search for the soldier's children in all decades for which they are alive.
• If you don't have a death date for a child, search for the child in all decades of the census.
• This includes adopted children.
• Search for the children's death dates and causes.
• Search for step children when they are children the spouse brought to her marriage with the soldier (so they were part of his household).
• Search for the step children's death dates and causes.

If the soldier's spouse never had children with him, and she was never enumerated in his household on the census, then there is no need to add her to the grid or search for her. Please do not spend time doing this.

ALL of the soldier's children should be added to the grid and searched for. If the soldier had a child who was born and died in the same year, and was never enumerated with the soldier, you must still add this child to the grid. The child's line will be all black dots and purple gravestones.

If a child survived, but you never found her/him in the census with the soldier, you must still add her/him to the grid and search for her/him.

We must follow these rules to save time and money, as well as make our data consistent.

Please check household 0

Please make sure you check HH0. This includes:

• Making sure the correct family was found.
• Making sure that family has been input correctly.

We've been finding a lot of inputting errors in the data. We think many of these errors are from the extant data, and need to be caught and corrected by you.

Some examples of errors you might see are:

• W in the race for 1850 and 1860. This is rarely input on the manuscript in those decades. So we should be following our rule, "if it's there put it in, if it's not leave it out." So, if it's blank on the manuscript it should be blank on the screens.
• In the early decades, the inputters often missed "Attended School." Please fill it in where appropriate.
• Strange codes in a field. Please replace the codes with the correct information from the manuscript.

Just for fun - Names

Here are a few of the fun names we've come across over the course of many years of data collection.

• Major Gross
• Solomon Sideboard
• Cooney Hoppy
• Latina Gooing
• Green Brown
• Shmaltz Burkheart
• Otter Green
• Cheeseman Hughes
• Ivy Beard
• Noah Ark
• Israel Deverse
• Jackson Dangerfree
• Elf Ellis
• Manly Crumbaker
• Increase Stevenson
• John DerBaptist
• Mingo Waddle
• Hilarious Shoeman
• Christian Bible
• Pompey Butt
• Dorcas Dippie
• Augustus Lightningstar
• Orange Dregs
• Large Ovens
• Insor Nail
• Taffy Bird
• Unezine Peelot
• Sipp Toodle
• Wilburforce Toothacre
• Rude Dally
• Finius Moron
• Brinkle Gummy
• Romulus Scipio
• Simmion Wigley
• Ah Quit
• Piety Byrd
• Ages Birth

A few more odds and ends

Here are a few more things we've noticed recently.

• Please don't write nonsensical occupations or death causes. You may always ask for help reading this information, and we encourage you to do so.
• Enter the death causes from the Mil Info into the Death screen.
• Don't forget to enter the place of death on the Death screen.
• Sometimes a 7 is written over the M for marital status on the census manuscript. This was something that was written later for all those people over a certain age that claimed they were married but were not living with a spouse.  We have decided we do not want to take this 7 as data.  We will accept the originally recorded "M" for marital status.

Does anybody have any questions?

Social Security Applications and Claims Index

A new index has been appearing in our search results, and we've had a few questions about it. So here is information about the US Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007.

Here is an excerpt from Ancestry's explanation of the index:

You may also find details on changes made to the applicant's record, including name changes or information on claims that were recorded. The most common types of claims noted include: Original SSN (when the original application was submitted to obtain a SSN), Life Claim (when a claim was made for disability or retirement benefits), Death Claim (when a claim was made by a surviving family member for death or survivor benefits), and Duplicate SSN (usually used when an application was made to replace a SS card, it may also indicate a change in SSN or that more than one SSN was assigned).

Read here for more information. Scroll to the information below the search box.

Recently, it was asked if we could use this index as a death source.

If there is a death date, go ahead and use it as a death source. Check Ancestry and Other in your death sources, and fill in the name of the index.

If you find a death claim, and there is no death date, you may assume that the person is dead by the date of the claim and use it for a death range (remember, all ranges are QC3).

If you find a life claim, then you MAY NOT use this as a death source. It is a claim for benefits by the individual while she or he is still alive.

Time sheets are due

Just a reminder that time sheets are due by close of business (eastern time) today.

When you get payed, please continue to make sure you've been paid for the correct number of hours. There have been a lot of problems. The sooner we find the problems, the sooner we can get them resolved.

For those of you who enter your time daily, I'd like you to change that procedure a little bit. After you submit your time sheets today, please don't enter anymore time until Wednesday. On Wednesday, you may submit all your new hours through that day. Then you may resume daily entering of hours worked.

The reason I'm asking you to do this is because, submitting additional time when your time sheet is going the the approval and payment process is causing the system to think you have unapproved hours that need to be taken care of before payroll can finish paying employees. The system sends me an email, and there is a lot of confusion. So a brief delay in submitting hours at the beginning of the pay period would solve this problem. I hope that make sense. Let me know if you have questions.

A note to the newer inputters (the rest of you should read this, too)

To all the new inputters - It looks like all of you are getting the hang of doing the census. Great!

Now that you know what you're doing, you can start to pay attention to the details. It looks like your checks aren't usually covering any new ground. They detail mostly little, but important, things. You can significantly improve your checks by making sure to glance at the information before you hit submit. Look for the following:

• Make sure the name input matches the name on the manuscript! This is missed A LOT. It's important to get this right!
• Are all the appropriate fields filled in?
• Do any of the fields look weird, like perhaps you were off and entered data in the wrong field?
• Check Household View and make sure you assigned everyone the correct household number.

Before you hit COMPLETE:

• There should be no red Xs for any of the census decades or the death screen.
• If you have death information in addition to the Mil Info, make sure all of it is entered.
• Make sure ALL of the soldier's children are on the Grid, even if you never found them in the census.

A note about the input logs:

• If the soldier had no children, write "no evidence of children," or some variation of that phrase on the log. I need to know this, because these soldiers will be dropped from the sample, though the information about the soldier will be kept.
• If the soldier had children and a spouse, but you could not find any of them in the census, write "no additional households," or some variation of that phrase on the log.

I know all of you are capable of fixing these errors. I hope you'll all be off 100% checks soon. Feel free to share any hints you use to prevent these problems in the comments section.

Great job!

Great work. Over about the last week, you've exceeded our weekly goal of completing the work for 75 recruits. You finished just over 100 soldiers!

Here are the statistics for the week:

• 753 total soldiers complete
• 105 soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)
• 648 soldiers with children complete
• % with children complete (n=8,500) = 7.6

Keep up the good work!

Odds and ends

Here are a few things to remember.

• You should be checking the previously input information for HH0 (the soldier). If it's wrong, please correct it.
• If your soldier doesn't have any children, please try not to spend more than an hour on him.
• Checkers - if the inputter enters exactly what they see on the manuscript, it is never wrong, even if they've typed in a little extra information, such as "Town of." Therefore, you don't need to tell them multiple times that it's a mistake.
• If the soldier has no children, please mark that on your census input log. Most of your are, but a few of you need a little reminding.
• Pay Attention! Double check what you've input before you hit Submit. All it takes is a glance to see if something doesn't look right.
• MAKE SURE YOU ENTER NAMES EXACTLY AS THEY APPEAR ON THE MANUSCRIPT. This is one of the most common errors we find. Please do it correctly.

Here is a change I'd like you to make on your input logs. Some of you already do it, and I want the rest of you to start. Please list all of the children and spouses you will be searching for. Only the children and spouses you find will have household numbers. It should look something like this.

STINER, ALEXANDER 5100408189

1 Clara (01)

2 George (02)

3 Alex (03)

Joseph (04)

Frank (05)

Kate (08)

"Other" in Death Sources

A couple people have asked for some clarification about when to fill in "Other" in the Death Sources. There are two rules for using this field.

1. Your death source is not listed Death Sources section.
2. You want to provide further information about a death source that is listed.

Here are some examples of sources entered in "Other."

• Public family trees
• State death indexes (this is, by far, the most common)
• Censuses
• Newspapers
• Headstone applications
• Gravestone web sites other than Find a Grave, such as Billion graves
• Books and directories
• Burial registers
• Census mortality schedule

A few times, people have repeated in "Other" items that have their own check box, but have not provided additional information. Examples of this are Mil Info and Find a Grave. It is unnecessary to add either of these to "Other" because they both have check boxes, and additional information is not needed. In the case of Find a Grave, it doesn't matter, for our purposes, if it was the MI or IA Find a Grave. Marking the check box is sufficient.

We just want to know what sources of death information we are using.

Step children and their moms

There has been some confusion about step children, so here are the rules.

• Search for the soldier's step children if they lived in his household when they were kids.
• Do NOT search for the soldier's step children if they were in his household for one decade when they were teenagers or adults.
• Do NOT search search for the mother of the soldier's step children unless she had children with the soldier. This is really a time-saving measure.

If the soldier never had biological children, but he did have step children that you are searching for, then the soldier will not be dropped from the sample. If you're not sure if you should search for a given step child, let your supervisor know, and she will decide.

More about Suggested Records

We've had some questions about Ancestry's Suggested Records, so I will try to clarify my previous post.

We would like you to pretend that the Suggested Records don't even exist. Even if you do a separate search, based on that information, you are still using the Suggested Records and adding bias to the sample.

That said, Chis will be adding a check box (or something similar) to the screens to indicate that you've used the Suggested Records to find a census decade or death information. The reason for this box will be so that users can DROP that data from the sample (so that they won't have to account for the bias). So we really don't want you to use the Suggested Records, because we don't want to increase the likelihood that data won't be used.

Someone mentioned that occasionally people will use the Suggested Records when they are adding the hyperlink for previously entered data into the screens. This is fine, because this information was already found, and you're not using the Suggested Records to find new or additional data. In this case, you would NOT mark the check box (when we get it) indicating that you used the Suggested Records.

I hope I haven't further muddied the waters. If you ignore the Suggested Records box, you'll be just fine. Let me know if you have questions.

A new record!

Audrey holds the new record for the largest Grid and the most households. Here are the stats for her soldier.

Elijah J Barrett
Number of households: 16 (up to HH g)
Number of people: 191

I'm sure sure Audrey input all that data very quickly!

DO NOT use Suggested Records

Some of you might have noticed that Ancestry will occasionally suggest records outside the Family Tree hints. Please see link. The Suggested Records box is in the right panel of the Ancestry screen.

Please DO NOT EVER use the Suggested Records from Ancestry. If those records are correct they should come up in your normal searching. If you use the Suggested Records box, you will be adding bias to our data. We don't want to do that.

It is fine to use Family Tree hints. Ancestry figures those out based on the information we've entered into the tree. It's basically what we'd get if we did all the individual searches, just faster. The Suggested Records come from research that other people have done. Therefore, they will only be suggested if someone else has done research on the family. It adds bias, I think, because there is not an equal chance for all of our soldiers to have these suggested records. If there's not an equal chance that we'll find information for all soldiers, then we are adding bias to our sample if we use that information. Please don't ask me to try and explain it, because I really don't understand. I am not one of the brainy economists.

What you really need to remember is NEVER use the Suggested Records box to add records to your tree.