Adventures in Indexing

   A few months ago I met a nice older couple, Sister and Elder Phillips. They are service missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thier job is to photograph records from the Minnesota Historical Society archives. One copy of the records goes to the LDS Church for those who want to use it for genealogical research. The other copy is given to the state for their archives.
   I was talking to Sister Phillips about their work and she brought up indexing. Indexing is the process of transcribing records to a digital database to make searching for documents easier. I had mentioned that I had studied the German language for six years (four in high school and two years in college) She encouraged me to do indexing work. She explained that there are a lot of records and not a lot of people with foreign languages skills to index them.
  This seemed like a good idea. I was looking for volunteer work to do now that I have more spare time. I went to the website and took the beginner's tour.
  It didn't seem difficult at all. You find a project. The instructions tell you what documents you'll be looking at and what needs to be done. You get a batch of documents and look at them to see if they meet the project requirements. If they do then you see the document again with a digital form next to it. All you do is fill in the blanks. Easy.
  I decided that it was best to start with English language records. This would get me used to filling in the blanks and looking for certain pieces of information. The project I started on were birth certificates. I didn't realize how much information you can get from a simple birth certificate. You can find out where the parents were born. How old the parents were at the time of the birth. Some of the birth certificates had information about the employment of the parents and if this was their first child. Interesting. I could see how this would be very helpful to someone looking for ancestors.
  After a week or so of looking at birth certificates, I decided it was time to step up my game. Time to tackle some German records. When looking for projects, they are assigned a difficulty level. I was looking for easy. There were none. I had to settle for intermediate.
  I nervously found a project and started by reading the project instructions. They were in German. Right away I knew that I might be in a bit of trouble. My last German class was over 25 years ago and I was seriously rusty. Nevertheless, I pressed on.
  The next obstacle came when I looked at the documents. The printed part of the documents was in German Script. This is an alphabet that was used in the 18th,19th and early 20th centuries. Its use was mostly discontinued after World War II. This was going to be a bigger challenge than I anticipated. None of the German classes I took taught me how to read Script.
  Fortunately for me when I see something blocking my way I try to go around it or find a way through it. My foreign language skills, such as they are, are needed. I found a German Script chart that I could print out. It has the Script printing, the normal Latin letter and what a handwritten letter could look like. Problem solved.
   The challenges continued. German documents from the 1800s are not marked with what kind of document they are. Unlike United States records, they don't say "birth certificate", marriage license " etc. You have to read the document in order to find out what it is. To make this easier, there are samples to look at. The problem was that the samples were too small for me to be able to compare with what I had. I had to live chat with the help desk in order to find out how to enlarge the images. Another problem solved.
  Of course, that wasn't the end. My next challenge came in the form of handwriting. Being a pharmacist I believed that there is no handwriting, however illegible, that I can't read. I could read much of the handwritten portions of the documents, but there were some parts that I simply could not read. I had met my Waterloo. Fortunately, there is a way to mark a field illegible. I could keep going.
   Despite the challenges and the fact that it's more time consuming than I expected, I'm finding it interesting. When I index a marriage record I wonder about the bride and groom. Did they love each other? Was it an arranged marriage? Were they happy? Did they have children? Did any of those children live to adulthood?
   It's been a good experience so far despite the challenges. I'm hoping that as I keep doing it it will get easier. I like the fact that I might be helping someone to find their relatives. For the short ( or long) period of time while I work on their records, these people are not forgotten.  For me, that's a good feeling.