User:Carlyannbagley/sandbox16

Project Leader
Carly Bagley

Purpose
Towns in New England published annual reports throughout the 19th and 20th century. Most of these reports include vital statistics for births, marriages, and deaths. Many of these reports are also digitally filmed and available on Archive.org. Our job is to gather these and add them to the FamilySearch Wiki.

Task List
Task List

Instructions
1. Go to Task List and sign up for one of the Google sheets. Then select the hyperlink to open the Google sheet. Each spreadsheet is organized by state and by towns within the state. Select one of the tabs. Your spreadsheet should have columns for Year and Vital Statistics. 2. Open up another internet window or tab. Go to Archive.org. Type in your town, state, and "Annual Town Report" into the searchbar. For example, I would type in "Albany New Hampshire Annual Town Report" into the searchbar. 3. If you go here you'll see that there are several results for Albany, New Hampshire as well as annual reports for other towns. (The first two results are for Center Harbor) Select the first annual report for the town you are searching. In this example, it would be 1949. 4. We only want to include annual reports with vital statistics. So, "flip" through the digitized copy until you make it to the table of contents. Find the Vital Statistics heading and then "turn" to that page. - Is there no table of contents? Go to the "Search inside" searchbar and type "birth", "marriage", or "death" to double-check for vital statistics. - The vital statistics may also be listed in a sideways table. (See here for an example.) Therefore, sometimes vital statistic information isn't text searchable. You may have to flip through the page to find a vital statistics page. I've found that tables are on the last page. 5. Once you get to the page that starts listing vital statistics, copy the page's URL and add it to the Google Doc underneath Vital Statistics. List the annual report year underneath Year. (Be careful to list the report year and not the publication year.) - What if vital statistics aren't in this report? That's ok, go back to the Google spreadsheet and put "N/A" next to the year of that annual report. 6. Continue to repeat this process with your search results until you finish entering every year available for one town. Please keep your spreadsheet organized with the years in order. (It'll make your life easier!) For an example of a completed list, go here 7. Now that we have all of our data gathered, we will then add this information into the Wiki.