New checking system

I sent all of you an email about our new checking system, which will begin on October 1. It is summarized here for easy reference.

Who

• All inputters, who are fully trained, will be divided into pairs.
• It is your responsibility to coordinate and communicate with your partner.

What

• Each person in the pair will select two soldiers from her/his current assignment for the other person to check.
• One soldier will have a full check, and one will have a quick check.
• Email the checking documents (follow the guidelines in your manual), indicating if it was a quick check or a full check, and how long it took to do the checking. The email should be sent to the inputter, Sandy, and Heather.

When

• This is a monthly assignment.
• Checking documents should be emailed no later than the last day of the month.
• Pairs for the next month will emailed on the last day of the month.

Why

• We need to check our data for quality control and ongoing training.

Soldier's spouse and adopted children

If the only children the soldier had were adopted children, please go ahead and search for the children. Do not search for the soldier's wife in this case. Here is information about searching for the soldier's spouse.

• If the spouse had children with the soldier, then search for the spouse.
• If the spouse did not have children with the soldier, then DO NOT search for the spouse.
• If the spouse brought step children into her marriage with the soldier, but did not have children with him, then DO NOT search for the spouse.
• If the spouse and the soldier adopted children, then DO NOT search for the spouse.

Maiden names on the family tree

One of you had a questions about listing women under their maiden names on the Ancestry family tree. Here is Sandy's explanation.

The females should always be by maiden name.  This, I believe, is an Ancestry recommendation and standard for genealogy, but I couldn't find where I had read that before.  We can see what a female's married name is by virtue of her placement on the tree.  This way the veteran's daughters will all have his last name and can easily be differentiated by daughters-in-law with the same first name as the daughters.  If we are using maiden names for some females, it makes sense to keep the tree consistent and have all females listed with maiden names.  You can mark the married name as an alternate name.  From reading comments on Ancestry, it is apparent that the computer will know a female's married name and still give you hints for her with a married name even though her maiden name is the name that shows on the tree.  The other advantage of having the maiden name show is because it is a constant.  The married name may change if the person gets married more than once.  If we don't know the maiden name, then she should show up on the tree with first name only.

Progress report

Here is our Project 1 progress report as of Wednesday.

• 1107 total soldiers complete
• 141 w/o children (to be removed from sample)
• 966 soldiers with children complete
• % with children complete (n=8,500) =  11.4

Here are your link rates for all children outside the soldier's household. That means, this is the percent of children you found and input who were living in their own households.

• 1910 - 57%
• 1920 - 64.7%
• 1930 - 65.5%
• 1940 - 57.6%

These are excellent find rates. Great job!

New checking system

Beginning October 1, we will have a new checking system. Everyone except Jessica and David will be off 100% checks, so it's time for everyone to check and be checked. The purpose for this is ongoing training and quality control of the data.

We will probably tweak the system, but in the beginning, here is how it will go. I will assign each of you to a pair. During the month, the people in each pair will email their partners. The two of them, they will each do two checks of the other person's work - a full check and a quick check. You get to choose which soldiers you want checked. The next month, you'll all be assigned a new partner.

Next week, look for an email from me with more detailed instructions and a list of the October pairs. You will each still have to check the work of trainees in addition to your partner.

GEDCOM files

Just a reminder about your completed family trees.

Some of you have been doing a great job of sending me the GEDCOM files of your completed family trees. Others need to improve.

When you're finished with your assignment and any checking is completed, please download ALL the completed family trees for that assignment from Ancestry. Please EMAIL all the files to me. They are small, so you should have no trouble sending them as attachments. After you've sent them to me, you may delete the trees from your Ancestry account. If you're unsure how to do this, please ask or consult your training manual.

We might want to use these files later, and it would be a shame to lose all that work.

More comments and clarifications

Thanks to Sandy for making notes on a few things that have come up in the checks recently.

• Town of anything--No need to put "town" in either before or after.  Same goes for city of...

• Town following the name--You don't have to put it in unless you think it's part of the name of the town.  It's never wrong to input it if it's there.

• District No.--  You don't need to put in NO, but it's not wrong if you do.  Checkers may say it once to inputter,  but the inputter doesn't need to go back and fix it.  Just remember going forward that it saves time by not typing in NO.  Do not ever include the symbol # for number.

• Marking death records --Mark all the death records you found and attached to the tree.  Include data from all of them onto your grid. Only include the links from the two best sources. 

• Grid names -- It doesn't matter how the name appears on the grid. It's just an administrative tool to help the inputter. You can make the prime name whatever is best to help identify that person.  (If you have 5 Ann Banks on your grid, spouse of vet, child of vet, spouses of vet's sons, then by all means pick the name that is easiest to identify them.)  However, the females on the trees should always be listed with their maiden names.

• WWI Draft Cards --  If the draft card has an exact birth date matching your child to the mil info AND an exact address matching to a census year, then that census year is a QC1 even if the spouse's name is not on the draft card.