This Week
Removed UK from Y & Z locations
Corrected ambiguous and misspellings in Y
61 cemeteries pinpointed and properly set up. What a job! and some of them are really hard to figure out and find! Shame on the people that threw the records together and did not bother.
Our goal was to push for having 2/3rds of the locations finished, which was far beyond my ability, and, yes, I proved myself incapable of such a push. We were just shy of 1% of making the mark, which is still really good. To do that we got over 3% done, which is three times our weekly goal.
But there was a cost to all that. It was hard not to stop and add census sheets and grave site info to all the people we had to hunt down to resolve the ridiculous place names and misspellings! But frankly, until these locations get resolved the rest of the work is hampered, so the sooner done the sooner we can get back to what we need to do.
If I can keep up the fast pace of 1% a week on the places setups, I will still be doing this in September. That is just too long, but it may be necessary. It is still much sooner than the 5 years the project started out to be. Remember, we started with over 90,000 locations, and have knocked it all the way down to over 17,000, so that alone is a huge task. I have really lost respect for those that just put whatever down as a location. The least they could do is put things down in a proper and consistent format that could be easily figured out. Making everything just short of a full case of charades is a real detriment.
We sprung for a program that promised to help things out, but alas, it was money wasted for that purpose. The folks have assembled a great database of locations, but our work goes beyond theirs by several leagues. It did however help locate some locations that could be better named in the Y section.
The cost of the big push meant that nothing got done in the email room. I’ll have to work triple time to get caught up and to dig deeper into the past email backlog.
Oh! and buried in the push was the fact we got another alphabet letter section completed! We are done with the F section and charging quickly through the E section. We are still a long way from what we had done when we started at the beginning with the number locations and so forth. We figure we were in C or D when we stopped and finally had a process we wanted to follow. So we are hoping that once we reach where ever that was, we will be able to proceed much faster on locations!
Pending
- Location Cleanup (in progress 65% done)
- Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (G, H, Y, Z done)
- Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started)
- Albums rebuilt
- Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
- Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
- Alternate family names moved to AKA names
- Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
- Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
- Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.)
- Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
- Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
- Start the newsletter
- Public comments and memorials for each person?
- Help videos made and implemented