Seeking examples for a training meeting

In February or March, we will have our fabulous genealogists come to Vienna for a week of training meetings. To facilitate this, we are seeking examples of individuals and families that you're having difficulty finding information for, either census or death. Through the end of December, please do the following:

• As you work, notice when you're having difficulty finding either census or death information for a family or individual you are working on.
• Please note, do not tell me about every yellow X on your grid. If you have one yellow X in a sea of green, I'm not interested in this person.
• We're more interested in the "I can't find this person anywhere" or the "I know I should be able to find this person, but I can't" sort of situations.
• I'm hoping you'll recognize the examples I'm looking for when you come across them.
• When you've found a good example, email me the following information
• RecId number
• Soldier's name
• PID of the person you're having trouble with
• Any information about it you feel we need (please keep this to a minimum as the genealogists will be doing their own research)

We are looking for families that will be good for training. I will create a list for Janice and Irene to review and research. Additionally, if you have any burning research related questions, feel free to send those to me as well.

An additional note about yesterday's NHDVS post

In yesterday's post about using National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, we told you to, "double check his military service to make sure it is the right soldier." How do you do this?

For both Project 1 and Project 2, the soldier's military service is indicated in his RecId number. Please review this post from September 2015 for more information.

National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers

Here is some helpful advice from Janice.

Anytime you see that a soldier’s last residence is the US National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, you should get a bit excited because that means you have a source that will give you a cause of death, which is a big part of this project. Go to the Ancestry site: US National Homes for Disabled volunteer Soldiers NHDVS Link (you'll want to bookmark this page), and type in the soldier’s name. When you pull up the record, you can double check his military service to make sure it is the right soldier. Be sure not to confuse the “disabilities when admitted” at the top of the page with the “cause of death” at the the bottom right of the page.

Progress report as of November 9, 2016

Here is our progress as of November 9, 2016.

	Project 1	Project 2 - USCT
	n = 8,500	n = 4,500
Total soldiers complete	4805	1580
Soldiers completed during last 2 weeks	182	32
Soldiers w/o children (to be removed from sample)	478	275
% of completed soldiers w/o children	9.9	17.4
Soldiers with children complete	4327	1305
% with children complete	50.9	29.0

Kate the cat in costume

A belated Happy Halloween to all of you.

October checking stats

In October, we checked 44 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? - 7
• Missing HH member - 5
• Duplicate people - 5
• Wrong person - 2
• Other - 4

Inferred Relationships

• Incorrect relationships - 16

Census Errors

• Name - 47
• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 79
• State Code - 0
• Missing/Wrong URL - 2
• Missing data - 39
• Additional finds - 17
• Quality Code - 18

Death Errors

• Typo/Reading/Wrong - 12
• Missing data - 29
• Missing/Wrong URL/Source - 6
• Quality Code - 3
• Additional finds - 8

Tree Errors

• Missing/Incorrect information/relationships - 19

The total number of differences for all 44 soldiers is 318. This is 130 fewer differences than September, when we checked 48 soldiers. Some differences/errors affect the data more than others. If we checked other pensions, we'd probably find similar differences. Let's see if we can reduce these differences in November.

Duplicate family members

Check carefully to avoid duplicates.  Make sure when you see a grandchild with your vet, or a niece or nephew with a child of the vet, that you realize that this is a person that you might already have on the grid or might find later living with their immediate family.