Summer Inputting Challenge - Update

Here are the totals, as of this morning, for our summer inputting challenge. This is the number of soldiers completed since June 23.

Project 1 - 230
Project 2 - 138

Total - 368

We're nearly halfway to our goal. Keep up the good work!

Progress report for July 19

Here is our progress as of July 19, 2017. You all did a great job completing a lot of soldiers over the past week. Keep up the good work!

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	6879	2276
Soldiers completed during last  week	62	45
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	617	390
% of completed soldiers w/o children	9.0	17.1
Soldiers with children complete	6262	1886
% with children complete	73.7	41.9

Summer Inputting Challenge - Update

Here are the totals, as of this morning, for our summer inputting challenge. This is the number of soldiers completed since June 23.

Project 1 - 171
Project 2 - 99

Total - 270

Keep up the good work!

Summer Inputting Challenge - Update

We're two weeks into our summer inputting challenge, in which we're going to input 800 soldiers and their families by Labor Day, even though much of the staff will be on vacation for part of the summer.

So far, we've completed 93 Project 1 soldiers and 46 Project 2 soldiers. That's a total of 139 soldiers.

Remember, if the goal is met, your reward will be to receive an extra day's worth of pay. I'll figure out the average number of hours you worked per day during the challenge period. That means, if you have an extra hour or two here or there to work, it will bump up your average as well as bring us closer to the goal. Good luck!

New birth date rule

This is a rule that applies to your family trees. Please pay special attention to the birth dates. As you've all learned the hard way, some birth dates are better than others. When you add a document to your family tree, and it has the most complete date from the best source, mark it as Preferred.

In other words, if you come across a good source with a birth date that is more complete and accurate than any you've already attached to your tree, please mark that date as Preferred.

Tips for searching Project 2 families

Irene came up with a few tips to help search for Project 2 soldiers and their families. This will be of special interest to those of you I've recently assigned to Project 2. Thanks, Irene!

Project 2 is a challenge, but it can help sharpen your research skills. The most difficult thing is making peace with having more No Finds on the grid, so just expect that will be the case with many of them. Here are a few tips:

- Be more lenient on ages - they tend to be less exact than for Project 1 soldiers.

- Be more diligent in looking for possible clues - relations on the same page, migration patterns, naming patterns, parents' birthplaces, relatives named on records like death certificates and WW draft reg cards, etc... 

- If you find a pretty good match for a person but they are indexed as white, don't assume it is not the person you are looking for. Be sure to double check the manuscript. Sometimes M (for mulatto) was mistaken for W (white). And sometimes they really were enumerated as white, so if all other information matches, you may still use the source but lower the quality code.

- You can narrow search results by race on the censuses. If you do this, you'll need to try all variations - black, mulatto, negro, colored. I only do this when I have someone with a very common name and my initial searches did not work.