FLHIG

Family and Local History
Indexing Group

Selected articles from the Newsletter

This article first appeared in SIGGNL 8  (February 1995)

(Not much) More on Census Indexing
 

Introduction

In spite of the number of persons who have been involved in census indexing (which does not include your editor), comments on Andrew Warren’s article in the last newsletter have been far and few between.  The following comes from Chris Swarbrooke of St Leonards on Sea:
 

As regards planning the style and contents of the index, a small society like the Hastings and Rother does not have the manpower or volunteers for “teamwork” in the true sense of the word, but has to rely on the same two or three people all the time ... in order to transcribe, check and then print the surname index.

A surname index that gives the location of any given surname with film and folio number is the usual format for most FH societies, and this is the format that we use, enabling the user to find the surname with the least difficulty, and they then finish the transcription, because they are more familiar with what they are reading (family, occupation and birthplace), and would correct the spelling mistakes made by the Enumerators.

A bonus to add to any index is a list of streets, public houses/hotels and institutions located by film number and either enumerator’s district or folio number ...”

This last point brings us to the question raised by our correspondents from the Ontario Genealogical Society, and which relates to any index, not just those to censuses. 

The question is, whether one should add anything to the essential features of an index, those in the above example being the surname and means of finding each reference to it (folio number, etc).  With the use of the computer there is a growing tendency to put into an index as much information as possible, so that it finishes up as one correspondent puts it “more like a summary than an index”.

The argument for this treatment is, that the information is already available, has been collected, and will probably be wanted sooner or later by a user.  On the other hand, this may make the index so bulky that it is difficult to find what one is looking for, and it becomes too expensive to print or reproduce for distribution.  It seems to me that one has to distinguish between a database and an index.  All the details can be incorporated into a database record, but an index should only contain a few fields, such as surname, forename(s) and date of birth and/or death. 

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