Talk:FamilySearch Indexing: US, Texas—Deaths, 1890–1976, Project Updates

Help us improve the indexing and arbitration of this project. Click the Edit This Page button to make suggestions. Messages will be removed after careful review by support and any updates will be posted to the Project Updates page. Many commonly asked questions, such as indexing crossed out information, have already been answered in the Basic indexing instructions.

 The instructions state to leave blank the city or town field if not listed but what about when the city isn't mentioned but the county is? Should you still mark the field blank for city or town or should you list the county name followed by county or just the county name? Thank you!

As you have correctly noted, mark the field blank if city or town is not recorded. 

I have indexed several of these and find your instructions very clear and think this is one of the better written ones since they are so clear. However, when they come back from arbitration, the arbitrators are NOT following the directions. Is there anyway you can send notices to ask them to read your directions, especially concerning these three items:

1) When indexing the birthplace and the county is given, do NOT insert the county and leave it blank. The arbitrators are inserting them when we leave them blank!

2) When a married woman has a middle name listed and you can determine that it is her maiden name by seeing her father's name, you are supposed to use that name in her surname field, but the arbitrator marks you off for this and changes it back to the middle name.

3) When the name as A/K/A or similar items, your instructions clearly read to use or such as John or Jack, etc. but the arbitrators are changing it to just read John and not using the or.

When we check it, we can mark it for review but if the arbitrator only makes one or two errors on a batch, it most likely will not be brought to any one's attention unless you have a number of these in one batch. Since the batch only has a total of 10, it is not likely to have a large number of errors to attract attention so unless you do something to call this to the arbitrators' attention, these errors are going to continue over and over again. Please do something to help make this correction. It does no good for us indexers to do it correctly if the arbitrators will not follow the directions!