FamilySearch posted an announcement entitled, "
Massive Online US Obituaries Project Will Help Find Your Ancestors." The project is described as follows:
In celebration of Family History Month, FamilySearch International (FamilySearch.org) and GenealogyBank (GenealogyBank.com) today announced an agreement to make over a billion records from historical obituaries searchable online. It will be the largest—and perhaps most significant—online US historic records access initiative yet. It will take tens of thousands of online volunteers to make GenealogyBank’s vast U.S. obituary collection more discoverable online. Find out more at FamilySearch.org/Campaign/Obituaries.
This is an area that seriously needs additional records. Most online obituary indexes only go back a few years. Any obituary indexes before 1970 are fairly scarce. Of course, you can search the newspapers for obituaries, but having an name index would be very helpful. The scope of the project is described as follows:
The tremendous undertaking will make a billion records from over 100 million US newspaper obituaries readily searchable online. The newspapers are from all 50 states and cover the period 1730 to present. The completed online index will be fairly comprehensive, including 85% of U.S. deaths from the last decade alone. The death collection will easily become one of the most popular online genealogy databases ever, detailing names, dates, relationships, locations of the deceased, and multi-generational family members.
See the link above to volunteer.
Has it been put into writing and publically published that once done these indexed obit databases will be online free rather than hidden behind some paywall at GenealogyBank.com??
ReplyDeleteIt is stated in the post that the indexes will be free on FamilySearch.org.
DeleteI'm excited about this project and plan to do my part to help index. I hope this goes smoothly like the indexing of the 1940 census did.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment.
DeleteHope the project will begin with and concentrate on pre-20th-century newspapers.
ReplyDeleteSince the papers at GenealogyBank are already indexed, anyone can subscribe and find a lot more than obituaries.
James Tanner, in a previous article, you mentioned: "If you are going to work with historical records, you should know a little bit (perhaps a lot) about how the records are recorded and what to look for in the record." From a professional standpoint, in evaluating all indexing, I sometimes seriously wonder if the persons running the project realize how improperly excluding information, while doing cursory indexing, can hide key sources, more than reveal the essence of the record sources, and discourage people from actively checking the record itself. Briefly, I state that, as examples NOT to follow, are the supposedly indexed United States World War I Draft Registration Cards; also, the United States World War II Draft Registration Cards. Articles describe the collections, as to what is in them; nevertheless, as a practical issue, FamilySearch, in its online search results, only shows (WWI) the date of birth for the individual. The record itself has such items as the person's home address, citizenship status, where you were born (rather critical, don't you agree?); married or single; etc. Now here we go again, with a massive wonderful new indexing project. Will it also exclude the addresses? See, I have looked at obituaries and many have addresses. So I think, well, if WWI were properly indexed, there would be a match. My thinker says this is creating a dysfunctional record indexing process. Who makes the final decisions on these matters? And everyone has a visual "verbal" photograph, in the excluded biological data; exceptionally important for medical pedigrees. Yes? Then, going on to the WWII issue, I am totally dumbfounded that the "name and address of a person who would always know the registrant’s address" was not indexed. How often it is a family member, like the census records, or someone, who in tracing other record sources, becomes the vital key to breaking open lineages. Example: [Robert Ort (son) same address]. So, if someone wants to encourage the family history community, please show us properly, how to index the records correctly the first time, so that they will complete the matching online, in front of our interface.
ReplyDeletePoint very well taken. Thanks for the comment. I should probably review this subject in a blog post (unless I did so already rather recently and can't remember :-)
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