Another Indexing Phenomena: Typography

{Follow-on from last Sunday's post.}
So another interesting few things about Indexing?

The handwriting is so different based on

• Regional of the country, or country of origin even, if international
• The year of the record (beautiful early 20th century penmanship!)
• The position of the person keeping the record (ship captain, vicar, military recruiter, census taker, town clerk)
• Education level of the scribe.

Once I started getting good at the "plain vanilla records," I upped the ante and started checking out  batches of records with higher difficulty ratings.  After all, you get more points for transcribing harder records!  (Points in heaven?  Toward a Disney Vacation?  Ego only?)

I went for passenger manifests from German freighters first, sailing into Boston.  Not too bad.  Then I tried some Parish records from 1800s in Sussex, England.  More difficult.  Then I tried a couple parish records from the 1600s.  Yikes!  I looked at the page and it didn't even look like it was English!

For Pete's sake, (or Peeter's, perhaps ^) what do they think the average indexer is going to make of those pages?  Level 5 wasn't made for lay-people, but for historians and educated transcriptionists!  (Example comes from a help document called Old English Paleography.)

Peeter Tyler, sonne of Tho Tyler &

of Eliza his wife borne in his house in Rose and

Crowne Ally in Grays Inn Lane Bapt the 10

I've decided that I am not QUITE ready for those documents above, but I'd like to cozy up to some of the more difficult ones anyway.  So now, here are a few documents I just checked out as examples from Dorset, England Parish records.

This one is from 1638, and has burial records.  Looks doable.

This one from 1649 looks like the scribe was much more liberal with his ink, so will be easier to record the burial information.  Notice the thorn ("ye").

Donations for the "necessary relief of the poor"... how many shillings would you give each week?  And how many Wm's were in the Parish of Piddingham in 1834?

I guess the 1730s were the decade of swirly girly writing, perhaps.  These baptism records are going to be a little bit tougher to wade through, but I'm confident I'll make it.

The good news is that with each page indexed twice, there is an arbitrator called in to review the two submissions that don't agree word for word, then casts the deciding vote on which one to accept.  So in addition to getting points, for each line or document, there is a rating, like "Your submission of record X on date Y was arbitrated at 98% accuracy".  The bad news is that reading these free-hand documents often result in lower accuracy.

And don't even get me started on indexing in foreign languages.