Please check HH0

It turns out that old mistakes in household 0 are coming back to haunt us. So we have decided that you need to do more than a cursory check of HH0. Please check HH0 carefully. Add URLs. Check everything, not just occupation or M1/M2.

We don't know if the mistakes we're seeing are from problems with the original data collection or if they happened when data were uploaded to the VCC screens. Of course, most of you didn't make the mistakes. Sorry, you'll have to correct them.

We recognize that this will slow you down a little, if you haven't already been doing careful checks. Sorry about that. Please do your best to continue bringing your times down while doing this work.

Cause and contributing cause of death

We had a question about the contributory cause of death. According to the Mil Info, the cause of death was "Asthma caused by disease heart" with nothing listed in the contributing cause.

Here is the question.

Should "asthma" be input on the Death screen as the cause of death and "disease heart" be input as the contributory cause?

The short answer is no. You should enter it just as it was in the Mil Info. Don't put anything under contributing cause unless it specifically says "contributing cause" or it's listed next to "contributory" on the death cert.

Searching

Here are some searching tips from Sandy.

Please remember you can search with one name only. You can even search a common name like John or Mary if you know exactly where they should be living, where they were born, where their parents were born, etc. Scroll down the list looking for a last name that looks similar to what you need. Remember it might start with a different letter (Hickson rather than Nickson, for example or Rammenam instead of Ammarman).

Similarly, you could search by last name only.

Or search with no names at all. Try searching all males born in 1844 (+/-5) in NY, living in Lebanon, MO. In this last case, Elija Pinkney was indexed as Eliza Priskrey.

Hints and records and family trees

When using the hints feature on the family tree, it is not necessary to clear all the hints. Sometimes there are a lot of hints, and you have to balance the time it takes to look at them all with the value they bring to your search and to the data.

When it comes to military records, Sandy had this to say. If there are just a few and you're sure it's the vet's records (you know where he served by his RecId number), you can save them to the tree if you want. But you don't have to.  Sometimes the vet has more than 20 hints and you may not feel like doing all of them . By all means attach hints that you think might help you find your person.  It comes down to personal preference and time. Please do attach any 1890 veterans census that appears to the veteran (and any WWI or WWII draft cards for any of his kids).

ALWAYS attach vital records to the tree for the veteran, his spouse, and their children. Make sure you remember to attach vital records that you found on both Family Search and Ancestry. Vital records include birth, marriage, and death records.

Always attach records that will be input on the Grid to the family tree. Also attach any records that will help generate useful hints.

If you have any tips about using hints or attaching records to the tree, please share them in the comments.

Completed family trees

Just a reminder to download your completed family trees and email them to me or save them to the file server. Some of you, who are in the office, download them as you go. That's fine. Others give them to me at the end of the assignment. That's fine, too. Still others wait until I ask you a few times to get them to me. This is not fine.

If you've recently (or not so recently) completed an assignment, work out a plan to get me your completed family trees. It's OK, if you want to wait to download the tree until after a soldier is checked. Just let me know that's what you're doing, and don't forget to send the tree later.

We're having a problem with people waiting too long to get me their trees. By the time they get to the task, they've lost the trees. We have several missing family trees in Project 1.

Soon, we will be testing a new tool that will require you keep up with your family trees. It's a good idea to get into good habits now.

New USCT record

Those of you who have been working on Project 2 know how difficult and frustrating it can be to find information on the USCT soldiers and their families. Recently, Stacy had a lot of success with one family.

There were 15 households and 164 people on the Grid. There were only three children that she couldn't find information for once they left the soldier's household. This is even more impressive, because the soldier's name was Robert Brown, and the family lived in the south!

I think Stacy was relieved after so much work to hit complete on this family. Good job, Stacy!

Checking documents

Just a reminder about your checks. Please type the inputter's name at the top of the Word document. Some of you are forgetting to do this. You might consider typing the person's first and last name to prevent confusion. We have two Davids now, and at least once, the check was sent to the wrong David. When I ask you to check a David's work, I try to indicate which David it is.

Adding black dots

I get many requests to add black dots to the Grid. When you make these requests, please give me the birth date. Please do not just ask me to add black dots for 1850 to 1870, or to everything before 1900, or whatever. When I add the black dots, I type the birth year, so that is the minimum amount of information you need to give me. Please.

Household 0

Please check  household 0 a little more carefully. We've noticed that there are a lot more mistakes in it than we originally thought. Bummer.

Funny statements from the documents

Here are a some funny statements we've found in some of the documents (mostly surgeons' certificates) of our Civil War soldiers.

• Slightly deaf in both eyes
• Have pain in stomach, especially when empty
• Constantly throwing off gas while in our presence
• Gums scared
• He is so spectacular in his pretensions of pain that he creates the suspicion of considerable exaggeration
• Every two or three weeks everything flies from him
• Is a splendid specimen of a healthy man
• Gastric flatulency troublesome as noticed in my presence
• Has with him at present ½ gallon of scales which he claims to have come off [left foot] within the last six weeks
• Soldier’s hands as soft as a lady’s
• We find him a weak, feeble, toothless and decrepit old man with thin white hair and beard looking like Rip van Winkle after his 20 years sleep.
• We find the right, as well as the left ear, completely closed by an accumulation of dust and wax, which upon being removed, discloses the ears to be in a normal condition. There is no loss of hearing.
• Thinks that the cause of dementia is that 3 years ago a friend of his slipped up behind him, grabbed him and said “take one with me,” placed a handkerchief over his mouth which he thinks was saturated with chloroform and forced him to take a dose of knock out drops, and later the same person slipped up and grabbed him by the testicles, which he thinks greatly injured him, and forced him to take another dose and robbed him of $18, that the party is a great ventriloquist and annoys him by throwing his voice to a great distance. Hears voices that threaten him and has all sorts of ideas which are not true and have no foundation.
• On duty drilling awkward squad

Death sources

Here are a few links to sources of death information. If you have others you'd like to share, please leave a comment.

Iowa
http://iowagravestones.org/

Michigan
http://seekingmichigan.org/discover/death-records-1897-1920

Utah
http://archives.utah.gov/research/indexes/20842.htm

Missouri
https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/archives/archivesdb/deathcertificates/#searchDB

Progress report as of May 4

Here is our progress report as of May 4, 2016.

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	3032	681
Soldiers completed during last week	55	32
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	316	140
Soldiers with children complete	2716	541
% with children complete	32	12

April 2016 checking statistics

In April, we checked 42 soldiers under our system. I've reviewed all of the checks, and I've tallied the number of differences. Some of these are errors, and some are judgment calls. Here are the categories and the total number of differences for each category. This month there was at least 1 error in every category.

GRID Errors

• MILIN?/MAR? - 2
• Missing HH member - 9
• Duplicate people - 4
• Wrong person - 1

Inferred Relationships

• Incorrect relationships - 15

Census Errors

• Name - 26
• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 104
• State Code - 1
• Missing/Wrong URL - 4
• Missing data - 23
• Additional finds - 32
• Quality Code - 13

Death Errors

• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 6
• Missing data - 28
• Missing/Wrong URL/Source - 6
• Quality Code - 4
• Additional finds - 12

Tree Errors

• Missing/Incorrect information/relationships - 13

The total number of differences for all 42 soldiers is 305. This is 85 fewer differences than last month. Some differences/errors affect the data more than others. If we checked other pensions, we'd probably find similar differences.

Before you hit complete

A tip from Grant and Sandy:

Here is a tip from Grant that he wrote on checks:

When I do my final check on a family, first thing I’ll do is open up the household view and make sure all the last names in each census year match up. Just a tip


This is a good tip that we should be doing all along anyway, but it doesn't hurt to check one more time at the end to help catch name spelling errors and changes in name due to marriage.

A note to checkers

Here is a little checking reminder from Sandy.

Checkers:  Please be sure you are actually making the changes on the screens that you are writing down on the checking doc. If you want the inputter to make the corrections, make sure you highlight it in yellow.  I've been spot checking what checkers say they have changed, and it hasn't always been done.  I think the problem is that you write down the mistake on your check sheet first before you correct it,understandably wanting to look at the screens to type accurately the mistake the inputter made.  By the time you finish typing everything, you have forgotten that you haven't actually made the change.  Please double check that you have made the corrections!!

Be sure after making the corrections that you click SUBMIT, rather than just closing out of the screens, to make sure the program saves any changes that you made.

A few friendly reminders

Here are a few needed reminders.

• You may delete Death screens yourself. There is a delete button at the bottom.
• If a person was born during the census decade, I cannot put a black dot on that decade. For example, if the person was born in 1870, the screens will put black dots for 1850 and 1860. If the person was born after the census was enumerated in 1870, you may enter a black X.
• If a person died during the census decade, I cannot put a purple gravestone on that decade. If the person died before the census was enumerated, you may enter a black X.
• Please read the column names on the VCC People to Be Deleted from Grid document, and enter the information correctly. Tab or Enter so that I can see all the information you typed. After I make the change, make sure I did what you wanted.
• Don't forget the MilIN? and Mar? columns on the Grid.
• Make sure your relationships are correct both on the Grid and on the family tree.
• If it's there put it in; if it's not, leave it out.
• Look over HH0 and correct errors.

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