1900 Census links

You've been marking a lot of bad 1900 census links in your checks recently. Chris discovered that Ancestry changed the links to the 1900 census manuscripts about a week or so ago.

When you do your checks, go back to the tree and copy the correct link into the VCC screens. This is not an inputter error. For the soldiers you're currently working on, go ahead and make sure all the 1900 links are current and work. There is no need to go back to all your previous work and fix the links. Chris is working on a way to do that on the back end.

Using Individual Collections to Improve Your FamilySearch Results

Here is a post from Anne about using FamilySearch. Thanks, Anne! Sorry the captions in the example are so small.

Have you ever become frustrated with FamilySearch’s results? Sometimes they seem completely random and unrelated to your initial search or they pull results from England, Germany, and other foreign places. After you have exhausted Ancestry record hints and general searches in Ancestry and FamilySearch, you may want to try searching a specific collection.

I prefer searching a specific collection in the following situations:

·         The individual has a common name with John Smith or Mary Johnson. Searching an individual collection helps eliminate people with the same or similar names from other localities.

·         You are fairly certain an individual is in a specific state and you want to perform a focused search.

·         You have both of the parents’ names and want to search for all of their children within one record set such as Iowa marriages or Pennsylvania death records. Do this by only searching the parents’ names and leaving off the child and any dates.

·         You are frustrated with a lack of records and have tried using many different combinations of search terms and wildcards.

Birth records

When you find them, please add birth records to the family tree for the soldier, his spouse, and their children. Even if we don't have a place to input these records, we still want to have the information so we can get it later.

Reminders

Here are a few reminders

• CHECK HOUSEHOLD 0. There were different rules when HH0 was originally input. You also have better tools than they did. You are responsible for the quality of the work done on HH0, so please check it.
• CHANGE ALL NAMES TO MATCH THE MANUSCRIPT. Please pay attention to the name. Look at initials. Look at spellings. Make sure what is typed in the screen matches the manuscript.
• REVIEW YOUR WORK BEFORE YOU HIT SUBMIT. Really, it only takes a few seconds to look at the line on the manuscript and the information typed to see that it matches. Please review your work.

There is really no excuse not to do all these things, so please do them.

Progress report

Here is our progress as of April 12, 2017.

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	6272	1940
Soldiers completed during last  week	64	13
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	571	337
% of completed soldiers w/o children	9.1	17.4
Soldiers with children complete	5701	1603
% with children complete	67.1	35.6

Family trees

Please make sure your family trees are correct. That is follow all rules and naming conventions and make sure the information is correct. For example:

• Make sure birth and death information are correct
• Make sure relationships are correct
• When the GEDCOMS are created, we can't connect the children with the correct mother if the soldier had multiple wives. Please take the time to correct this.
• Delete duplicate individuals
• Make sure all the soldiers children are on the tree

Having all the information correct and updated on the tree will increase the quality and number of hints you get for that family. Additionally, in the future, not only will family trees be used as data, but they will be playing a larger role in the inputting process. So, it's very important that they be correct.

Interesting quotes from pensions

Here are some quotes we found in the pension records. The medical quotes come from surgeon's certificates. Enjoy!

“Chronic inflammation of gastric juice: Absurd” (Robert Livingston, C106 USCT)

“Low specific gravity due to eating freely of watermelons.” (Martin Brown, A137 USCT)

“This report, gentlemen, is by no means satisfactory. . . . Please try it again.”  (Samuel D Eastman, C 23 WI)

“This claimant is on the road to total blindness; will probably soon reach it.”  (Orrin Hay, C23 WI)

“Appetite fair, just ate dinner with me.”  (John L Rowin, A32 WI)

“The applicant is a nice, big, brave, cheery Irishman who has borne a very annoying disabling wound very patiently.”  (Patrick O’Brien, B43 WI)

"He could not hear a loud conversation at an angle slightly behind the right ear out of sight at a distance of 3 feet.  The conversation was such that he would have resented it if he had heard it."  (J. D. Smith, C9 IN)

“Respectfully referred to the medical referee, who will please advise me how “the refractive error of left eye is to be corrected by proper glasses” when the claimant is dead.”  (C9 IN)

“And it is my honest conviction, however speedy your department may be in adjusting his claim that the rider on his pale horse will beat you to his home a long while.” (G. Perry Roudebush, G26 IN)

“Lower extremity of nose is flattened more so than was George Washington’s.” (Edward O’Donnell B35 IN)

“Asylum records state cause of insanity was religious excitement, though our opinion is that the fracture of skull was the predisposing cause.”  (Francis M. Buxton I 156 OH—brothers sample)

(Note from Pension Bureau to Examining Physician) “If you will place your book of instructions before you when writing certificates and observe same you will avoid the return of them for correction.”

From the Special Examiner: "The claimant is a wonderfully ignorant man. The grey matter and the white matter in his brain seem to have run together, if they were ever separated, and have formed an impenetrable mass. It is almost impossible to make him understand anything. His sister Mrs. Lane is perhaps a little brighter, but she is so dense that the degree of difference is hardly appreciable. Her husband, Andrew Jackson Lane, is hardly "three feet to the yard," and is more ignorant than either of the other two. They are all of the lowest sort of people and live more like animals than human beings. Lane and his wife live back in the woods a mile perhaps from any other human habitation and I was not able to get any witness to their mark aside from that of the man whom I took with me. Lane and the claimant make a scant living for themselves and their families by cleaning out cesspools and doing such work as no other one will do."

"I think there is not much doubt but that the claimant was with the regiment as he claims, but he went along something like a horse and wasn't able to tell much more about his service than a horse."

“Had scurvy but is free from it now. Says he eat pork for 8 years and got scurvy then” (Uhline, Joseph G66NY)

Don't forget to update your logs

This is just a reminder that you need to keep your input logs updated. Some of you do an excellent job of this. Some of you struggle.

If you've shared a Google doc with me, make sure it has all the current information. If you stay on the line where you just entered information, I might not be able to see what you typed.

If you're in the office, and I retrieve your log from the server, please make sure the information is current and SAVE it. If you don't save the spreadsheet, I can't see the changes you've made. A couple of you have strange looking logs (from my perspective). They don't appear to have changed for a couple of weeks and don't seem to have all the work you've completed entered. Please save your logs!

Social media and questions

I want to make you aware of our Early Indicators project social media presence. If you know anyone interested in our project or economic history, please invite them to follow us.

https://twitter.com/earlyindicators

https://www.facebook.com/earlyindicators/

Since I haven't asked in a while ... Do you have any questions you'd like answered in this space? Did our census meeting bring up any issues?