Please review music policy

Everyone needs to review the music policy stated in the September 1, 2015 blog post.

We have noticed that a lot of people in the office are wearing headphones. Trainees should never listen to music.

For everyone else, if I notice your quality of work goes down, you will not be able to listen to music either. If you are allowed to listen to music, you must turn the volume down. Humming, whistling, and tapping fingers and toes are not permitted. Please be courteous to those around you. Not only is this disruptive, it means you're paying more attention to the music than you are to your work.

Please email by the end of the day tomorrow (July 19) to let me know you have read and understand the blog post from September 1, 2015.

Progress report as of July 13

Here is our progress as of July 13, 2016.

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	3634	1063
Soldiers completed during last week	46	47
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	379	191
% of completed soldiers w/o children	10.4	17.9
Soldiers with children complete	3255	872
% with children complete	38.3	19.4

When to use "Other" as a death source

We recently had a question about when to use the "Other" box in the Death sources section of the Death screen. Here are some guidelines.

Use "Other" when:

• You have added additional information to the Death screen from a third or fourth source, so you can't add the URL to the screens. We're trying to identify where all the information entered on the screen came from.
• There is not a check box for the source you're using. If you found a record on Ancestry, check the Ancestry box. If you found it on a Missouri death index, and there's no box, check "Other," and type the name of the source exactly as it appears.

Every single death source you find for an individual doesn't have to be added, especially when there is no additional information. ALL death sources should be attached to the family tree.

Input what you see

We've noticed that several people are leaving information out. Please input what you see. This has mostly been a problem on the death screen. Even if a word is difficult to read, you must type something. Do not type one word of a pair and leave the other out. You may ask for help if you can't read something. Please type all the information in the appropriate fields.

Question about hints

There has been some speculation as to whether the family tree hints are getting better? What do you all think? Have you noticed an improvement in the quality of hints Ancestry is able to generate? Have you noticed anything else interesting about hints? Please share in the comments.

June 2016 checking stats

In June, we checked 42 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? - 6
• Missing HH member - 8
• Duplicate people - 1
• Wrong person - 0
• Other - 4

Inferred Relationships

• Incorrect relationships - 14

Census Errors

• Name - 30
• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 68
• State Code - 0
• Missing/Wrong URL - 0
• Missing data - 24
• Additional finds - 27
• Quality Code - 13

Death Errors

• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 4
• Missing data - 11
• Missing/Wrong URL/Source - 2
• Quality Code - 2
• Additional finds - 12

Tree Errors

• Missing/Incorrect information/relationships - 10

The total number of differences for all 42 soldiers is 236. This is 100 fewer differences than last month. Great job! Some differences/errors affect the data more than others. If we checked other pensions, we'd probably find similar differences.

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).