Fun names

I know many of you keep track of interesting names that you find in the course of doing your work. Here is a list of fun names from Irene.

• Fairy Lane
• Minnie Monor
• Hope Noble
• Daily Brewer
• Virginia Pork
• Violet Dove
• Golden Day
• May Day
• Winter Day
• Daisy Gardener
• Nector White
• Warfman Fisher
• Waterman Fisher
• Short Beams
• Joseph Free Cheeseman
• Horse Paynter
• Prince Short
• Hazel Green
• Worth Laughlin
• Merry Christmas Galehouse

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.

Example of SS App & Claims

During her presentation at the census meeting, Janice had wanted to show an example from the U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index on which a woman was listed with multiple names. She has found an example. Here it is.

If you have any questions about it, please post them to the comments, so that others may benefit from Janice's answers.

Blank names

Sometimes a person will only have one name on the census or obit record, or none at all. Follow these rules to input them:

INPUT THIS	WHEN IT LOOKS LIKE THIS ON THE DOCUMENT
(BLANK), Mary	When only first name shows (and last name isn't dittoed from above) such as on a death certificate.
Jones, (BLANK)	When only the last name is given and there is no first name
Jones, (?)	When it says, Jones, ? on the manuscript.
Jones, (WIFE)	When it says Wife in the wife’s line on the census underneath a husband whose last name is given
Jones, (BABY)	When it says BABY on the census manuscript and last name is written in or dittoed from above
Jones, (DEAD INFANT)	When mil info says DEAD INFANT or you find a death record saying DEAD INFANT [you can mark all decades with black x’s even without death date]
Jones, (CHILD)	When it says CHILD on mil info (include Vet’s last name)
Jones, (NO NAME)	When census manuscript says NO NAME
LEAVE BLANK	When it says unknown, not obtainable, not given or just ?  In other words, no names are given at all.

See previous blog post and comments on Sept 14, 2015 for additional reference.


What you're trying to accomplish is to make the name conform to our standard name format rules using whatever information you have. Anything that is not a last name, first name, or middle initial/name should be in parentheses ( ). If the first name or last name is left blank, let us know by inputting "(BLANK)."

Names, blanks, typos

In conjunction with our performance evaluations, we've reviewed some of the recent checks. In general, you're doing a good job. Here are a few things we've noticed that many people are struggling with:

• Names - Many of you regularly forget to change the name to match the manuscript. Some people help themselves remember to do this by always retyping the name, no matter what. Habits like this make it more difficult to forget something.
• Blanks - Please DO NOT leave any of the fields blank that have information on the manuscript. It looks like sometimes, the inputter ends up on the wrong field because of auto advance and misses some data or types it in the wrong field. Sometimes the inputter is looking at the wrong line of the manuscript. Other times, it's hard to read. If you need help reading something, please ask! Do not leave it out.
• Typos - Typos happen to even the best typist. We would like to minimize them.

It's all right to take a few seconds and scan over what you just entered to make sure it looks correct.

Apostrophes

Just a reminder - Please don't type apostrophes in names. It is causing problems in the screens. If the name is O'CONNOR or O'NEAL, then type OCONNOR or ONEAL.

Alternate names on family trees

When you're adding records to your family trees, if the name on the record IN ANY WAY DIFFERS from the name you already have, please click the Alternate name button. Please do this for the soldier and all his family members. If you're not sure if you've already added a particular alternate name, go ahead and click it just in case.

This will help with analysis of some the name algorithms we've been working on (or something like that; I'm really not sure how it all works).

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.

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.

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.