Reminder about 1850 & 1860 in Project 2

In Project 2, for the soldier and his family who are alive in 1850 and 1860, DO NOT mark either of these decades with a yellow X.

Most of the black soldiers and their families were slaves in 1850 and 1860, so they weren't enumerated on the population census. Even those soldiers who were free, were often not enumerated. Therefore, you may do a cursory search in those decades, just in case. But DO NOT mark the soldier, his spouse, or his children with a yellow X in 1850 or 1860. If you have census information for them, they'll have the green circle with a check mark. If you don't have census information for them, they'll have a black X.

Additionally, stillborn children are not marked with yellow Xs. By definition, they are dead and will not be enumerated on the census. Therefore, only mark them with black Xs if you don't know the birth/death date.

Let me know if you have questions.

Completed family trees

Just a reminder that you need to download your completed Ancestry family trees. You may do this at the end of your assignment when you get your checks back. If you are in the office, you may save them directly to the file server. Everyone else should email them to me.

Many of you are multiple assignments behind in downloading your completed family trees. This is causing confusion in my record keeping. Additionally, some of the trees are missing. We would like to keep these trees, so downloading them sooner rather than later will prevent them from being accidentally lost.

Thanks to those of you who are really good about downloading your completed trees. It makes my life easier and is appreciated.

Saving URLs in the VCC screens

We discovered that when saving URLs, the VCC screens turn them into all capital letters. Because of this, when we go back into the screens to get Family Search links, they do not work. The Ancestry links do work. We don't know when we will get this problem corrected.

If you find the census using Family Search, please go back to Ancestry and save that URL into the screens. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Corrections on Ancestry

When a name is indexed incorrectly, Ancestry has a mechanism for you to correct that name. Please email me by the end of the day on Monday, to let me know if you do this. We are trying to figure out if a lot of the names we've worked on have been corrected.

Additionally, per Noelle, please stop correcting names on Ancestry. We're trying to speed things up, and this slows us down. Also, we are working on some name matching algorithms, and we are concerned that these name corrections will interfere with the name matching tests we are doing. Please don't ask me to explain that, because I really don't understand.

Don't forget...

Just a few reminders.

• When you're working on a soldier, don't forget to update/check household 0 and bring it up to our current standard.
• Don't forget to change the names to match what is written on the manuscript.
• ALL of the soldier's children must be added to Grid and searched in all decades they are alive.
• If, based on your work, you think a couple of the children in the Mil Info are the same, there is no need to add the duplicate to the Grid or search the child twice. In this situation, you have more information than the original pension inputter had.
• If the Mil Info says (child), (child) without any other identifiable information, and you've found three children, there is no need to add these two "extra" children to the Grid.
• If the Mil Info says (child), and there is other identifiable information (such as a birth date) that does not match the information you've found, then you need to add that child to the Grid and search.

Death certificates

Death causes are very important for our data. Here is a helpful tip Irene wrote in one of her checks.

When you have a death date from Find A Grave or the mil info, you can quickly search to see if their death certificate is available on Ancestry's All Records search page by entering their exact death year and state.

We're noticing that death certificates, even when they are easy to find, don't always come up in the hints. If you've only found a document with a death date, go ahead and do a quick search to see if you can find a death certificate. Some states have a lot of death certificates available online and more are becoming available all the time. It's worth a little extra effort to see if the death certificate is available.

Death cause reminder

Just a reminder that if you cannot read the cause of death or the contributory cause of death, please ask. This is very important information for our study. Some of you are excellent about doing this, while others could use some improvement.

The best people to ask are Coralee, Heather, AnnaLisa, Noelle, and Jessica. We've all input surgeon's certificates and are pretty good at reading medical terms.

Tracking time

Just a few notes on tracking your time.

• No one is being accused of dishonesty. We're trying to get a handle on how we spend our time, so we can be more efficient. Some of you are naturally more efficient than others. We find that tracking how time is spent, in addition to giving us valuable information, helps each individual focus on how she/he is spending time. Measurement alone should help us improve.
• The spreadsheets I've received so far look like it was easier for you this time than last. Good. Go ahead and reread the instructions, just to make sure we're all on the same page.
• I am comparing the time tracking spreadsheets with your census logs, so please track time, as appropriate, on both.
• On your census logs, track date and start time, date and stop time and exact total time for each soldier.
• DO NOT include anything that isn't inputting or soldier related on your census log.
• Track how you spend ALL your time (not just searching and inputting) on your time tracking spread sheet.
• The time tracking spreadsheet  totals for each day should match what you submit on your time sheet. If they don't match, it makes it harder for me to evaluate what is happening.
• Some of you have asked if you should track your lunch on the spreadsheet. Initially, I said it didn't matter. I've changed my mind. Please don't track it on your spreadsheet. It's confusing me.

Let me know if you have feedback.

Husband or head of household?

Recently, there have been several instances in the 1880 census where the enumerator writes "husband" instead of "head" for the head of household. We've decided to make a rule that when this happens, the relationship should be "1" not "7."

Note: If the woman is ever listed as "head," and the husband is listed as "husband" on the manuscripts, then mark the husband "7" in the screens.

May 2016 checking stats

In May, we checked 44 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. 

GRID Errors

• MILIN?/MAR? - 4
• Missing HH member - 2
• Duplicate people - 1
• Wrong person - 0
• Other - 2

Inferred Relationships

• Incorrect relationships - 14

Census Errors

• Name - 40!
• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 103
• State Code - 0
• Missing/Wrong URL - 1
• Missing data - 46!
• Additional finds - 27
• Quality Code - 17

Death Errors

• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 10
• Missing data - 20
• Missing/Wrong URL/Source - 18
• Quality Code - 2
• Additional finds - 11

Tree Errors

• Missing/Incorrect information/relationships - 18

The total number of differences for all 44 soldiers is 336. This is 31 more differences than last month. Some differences/errors affect the data more than others. If we checked other pensions, we'd probably find similar differences.

Updating birth and death places on the family tree to generate hints

Donna suggested the following tip to her checkee to help generate better hints on the family tree.

For the place of birth and death of the soldier, I like to input a place Ancestry recognizes. I find this helps Ancestry generate better hints. It doesn’t always help though, and it isn’t required.

For example, the mil info gives place of birth as Telmurker, NW. Ancestry doesn’t recognize this place though because Telmurker is a misspelling and NW is a generated code. Since Norway is so unusual, I would change it to only Norway without the city name.

Mil info gives place of death as Rochester, Olmista, MN. Ancestry doesn’t recognize this because Olmista is a misspelling of Olmstead. To figure out Olmista was Olmstead, I started deleting what had been input until Ancestry gave me an option in the drop down box. This doesn’t always work though because the places are too misspelled or they don't exist anymore. In those cases, I just put in the state.

Relationship codes and HH0

Here is something to keep in mind when you're checking household 0. When much of this information was originally collected, we didn't have all the Relationship codes that we have now.

As always, when you're checking old work, please bring the data up to our current standard.

For example, you might find that siblings are marked as Relationship code 4. You should change this to the more accurate, Relationship code 10.

If you've noticed similar issues while checking, please let your fellow inputters know by leaving a comment.

Home value

There has been some confusion when reading home values and determining whether the zeroes are cents or dollars.

As a general rule, the rent will be a two digit number and can be followed by small zeroes for cents (14.00).  Value of a home that is owned will more likely be a four digit number (1400).

Death and the public family tree

A question came recently about using public family trees as death sources. Here is Sandy's answer.

If you find a DOCUMENT (like the photo of the death certificate) on a public tree, it can be counted as a DEATH CERTIFICATE and given a QC1 (assuming it's your guy with proof of parents' names and birth date just like any other death certificate).

A document on a public tree is not the same as an unsourced date written in a public tree. A document is a document and should be treated as such.

Do not take PLACE of death from a tree when you got the DATE of death elsewhere (example Find A Grave). If you found a good death date somewhere other than a tree, then use that (QC3 or higher). If the only place you find the PLACE OF DEATH to go along with that death date is a public tree, then we don't want you to use the place of death, because public trees are last resorts only and are QC4. If each field had a QC, then we probably would allow adding bits of information from a public tree.  But we can't do that.

If you only find the place of death and the death date on the public tree, then you may use the information from the public tree as a QC4.

In a nutshell: a public tree can be used for death information if, and only if, it is the ONLY information you can find. Give it a QC4.  If the tree has a photo of a document as a source of death information, treat that document like any other document with the appropriate QC up to a QC1.