Progress report

Here is our progress as of March 9.

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	2615	457
Soldiers completed during last week	63	37
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	285	101
Soldiers with children complete	2330	356
% with children complete	27.4	7.9

Great job, everyone!

Please review

Please spend about 30 minutes reviewing posts on the blog. It does not matter which posts you review. Select posts that address items you've had questions about or difficulty with in the past.

Please email me by Friday to let me know you've completed this task.

VCC People to Be Deleted from Grid

This is just a reminder to be careful when entering information into the People to be deleted Google doc. Some of you do an excellent job. You enter all RecIds and PIDs correctly, and you give me proper instructions as to what you need done.

Some of you have a little more difficulty. When you're adding soldiers to the Google doc, please keep in mind the following:

• Type the RecId correctly. I do not have time to go hunt down your assignment and get the correct RecId.
• Type the correct PIDs in the correct fields. If you want a PID entirely deleted, please don't type it in the PID to be modified field. I will get confused. I try not to make assumptions about your intentions.
• Be sure that your instructions make sense. Please remember that I haven't been studying these families for several hours, and what makes sense to you might not make sense to me.
• Please give clear, concise information so I understand what needs to be done.
• Hit "Enter" or "Tab" after you enter information in the last field. If you just leave your cursor in the last box you typed in, then I can't see what you typed. This happens a lot.

After I've made the changes, please check the Google doc and answer the following:

• Was the change made correctly?
• Is the line highlighted pink, indicating that I had a question?

A little more care and attention will help me make the requested changes in a timely fashion.

Project 2 soldiers without children

We've told you that we don't want you spending a lot of time on HH0 for the soldiers in Project 2. This is because a lot of time was already spent on them. If you find that the work is incorrect, you may delete it. If correct decades for the soldier come up in the hints, you may accept them and input them if you don't already have them. It is OK to do a little searching if it helps you find the children.

Soldiers who don't have children are going to be dropped from this sample. But they might still be used in the future. Therefore, if correct decades come up in the hints for your soldier, you may input them even if he doesn't have children. Use your judgement, and don't spend too much time on work that was already done once.

Vacations

Some of you are going on vacation in March.

If you're going to be gone for multiple weeks, please contact your checking partner soon, so that you'll be able to complete your monthly checks in a timely fashion.

Also, if you'll be gone when time sheets are due, please make sure you submit your hours before you leave. For those of you with Bureau health insurance, please make sure you submit hours for every time period. Your health care premiums are deducted from each paycheck, and accounting has trouble if you miss a pay period. If you need clarification about this or if you're not sure what to do if you're going to miss and entire pay period, please email me.

As always, if you will be taking time off, but haven't notified me, please do so.

February 2016 Checking Stats

In February, we checked 44 soldiers under our new 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 - 3
• Duplicate people - 1
• Wrong person - 1

Inferred Relationships

• Incorrect relationships - 5

Census Errors

• Name - 30
• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 90
• State Code - 0
• Missing/Wrong URL - 9
• Missing data - 56
• Additional finds - 25
• Quality Code - 19

Death Errors

• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 8
• Missing data - 26
• Missing/Wrong URL/Source - 15
• Quality Code - 5
• Additional finds - 6

Tree Errors

• Missing/Incorrect information/relationships - 14

The total number of differences for all 44 soldiers is 317. This is 52 fewer differences than last month. Good job! Some differences/errors affect the data more than others. If we checked other pensions, we'd probably find similar differences.

Duration of contributory cause of death

Some of you have found on death certificates a duration for the contributory cause of death. We do not have a field for this. DO NOT enter this information in the duration for the primary cause of death.

We've decided to make it a rule that you should enter the duration for the contributory cause of death in the Remarks field. Enter the information in the following manner:

CONTRIBUTORY DURATION: 5 YEARS 6 MONTHS

CONTRIBUTORY DURATION: MANY YEARS