On Wednesday we released the Liverpool, United Kingdom, Crew Lists 1860-1919 to be keyed, and reviewed. This collection contains records for ships whose home port was registered as Liverpool. There are only two forms, Ship Information, and Crew Lists that we will be entering data from – refer to the wiki page to see examples of these forms. The main difficulty for this project will be reading the handwriting.
Happy keying!
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@wayne, the easiest is thought the keying tool, help -> more about this project
that will bring you to the wiki page. for a particular project.
Also her post does have a lint to the help page.
Wayne,
I appreciate your feedback. Paul is right, you can access the wiki page from the keying tool. Since you are reading the blog you can also click on the name of the project and it will also bring you to the wiki page.
Hi Anna,
I have been done some of the Liverpool Crew Lists. When entering ship information, why is there no header information required for the name of the ship? Only a date field is available and nothing else.
Liz
I am having a real problem with the Canada Nominal Rolls and Paylists!! I download 20 at a time to review, and discover that none of the 20 have been keyed. Someone is selecting the “Paylist header” form type, which only requires the year to be typed in, and is submitting page after page un-keyed. Can you do anything about that?
Joan, there is something in your comment that makes me wonder if this computer program is written in such a way that records that have been keyed are hidden, ignored or just plain discarded by the use of such designations as “header” or “cover sheet”.
Having had hundreds of records which I keyed ignored, it makes me think something isn’t right. I’m still guessing as to what happened.
I’ll be checking to see what response, if any, you may get, in this public forum.
The next question is, if there is a problem, how bad is it, and how hard will it be to fix.
Marji – there are over 7,400 sets waiting to be reviewed (in this one project alone, others also have huge waiting lists). Is it possible that yours have not vanished but are simply waiting for someone to get them done?
Joan, until a few weeks ago, the number of records keyed in the last 90 days and total records keyed always were added to my totals shortly after they were submitted. I have asked about this a number of times, but cannot get an answer. I also asked if there was a backlog, but that was not answered.
I can always quit this project and continue keying for my hometown website, where I can get useful feedback.
It seems to me adding a records keyed count would be an automatic computer function, not dependent on people reviewing them.
If the “winners” of the challenge can get an immediate record count, it would seem anyone who submitted records would also have their records totaled and added.
With such a backlog, would’t it make sense to have people reviewing rather than keying and adding to the problem?
Thanks for your help, however.
Joan, where do I find the backlog/review information? I don’t recognize it on my screen. It would be helpful to be able to see it.
Thanks.
Marji – I am not sure. When I click on “download image sets”, it goes to a place where I have a choice of downloading sets to key or sets to review. If you are not an arbitrator, possibly you would not see that choice.
Are you keying Canada’s Voluntary Militia? I wonder if it is possible you are using the wrong heading and therefore the keying you do is not showing up?
A Paylist Header usually has, on one side of the page, a list of how much a man of each rank is paid per day, on the right side is a form in which they (usually) put the name of the regiment, the date, and someone signs it to authorize payment. The only thing that is required to be keyed is the year.
A page that contains a list of names to be keyed is either a paylist or a paylist continuation. Normally, but not always, a paylist has a lot of printing on the top, and handwriting showing which regiment it is, the year, and often the reason the men were called up. It sometimes has a date written just at the top of the list of names, that is the year to be entered in the date on the top of the form you key. If there’s no year there, there often is at the top of the page.
A paylist continuation usually starts with the rank of “private ….”, often above the first name it has a “brought forward” with a dollar amount.
The items I have been reviewing are ALL marked “paylist header”, so of course if a person has keyed a list of names, it will not show – a paylist header has only the year.
Hope this helps …….. I am not surprised you can get no help. I can’t either, and it was only extreme frustration that prompted me to try again.
Marji – I just downloaded and keyed one set from Canada’s Volunteer Militia. The first page was a “paylist continuation” but I selected “paylist header” to see what would happen – and it was not possible to key the list of names using that heading.
I wondered if it was possible you were using the paylist header in error, keying all the names, but the computer didn’t save them because with that header it only keeps the year. But I don’t think that could happen – I couldn’t do that anyway.
Incidentally, there were a total of 21 entries in that set, and my keying record increased by 21 as soon as I submitted it.
I am now in another series of ones that are marked, incorrectly, as paylist headers, and none of the keying is done. I hope I don’t have to reject all 20 this time – I am getting close to 100 of them in the past few days and it is a total waste of everybody’s time.
It is enough that a person often runs into a series of blank pages, a stretch of duplicates, without wasting even more time with this!!
Joan.
Thanks for your response. I’ve never seen anything but “download image sets”.
I keyed New Zealand Directory,in the Ashhurst area and surroundings, a 2 page set, very simple, with surname, given, prefix, suffix, or business.
I interrupted at the end of one page, and it showed I had keyed 299 records, the second page should have had about the same number.
In any case, I can’t see how I could have spend hours keying and checking only to have the whole thing blown away by hitting the wrong designation.
I would think everything that was keyed was saved.
In any case, I won’t ever be an arbitrator because my records don’t seem to be added to my totals. But they used to be.
You’ve been very helpful, by the way. Can’t wait to see what cheerful message we get this week, pretending the problems don’t exist.
In the meantime, I’m not keying here until the issue gets clarified. I will be doing cemetery records for my home county. Or maybe I’ll be “fired” from Ancestry for being a trouble maker.
Good luck.
Marji – I have noticed that if I keyed a part of a set, so that it showed I had done 250 (or whatever) and then finished it the next day, I was not credited for the first 250, only the amount I did in the second session. If it is important that your stats show accurately what you have done, it is important that you do the whole set in one sitting. I have no idea why it should be that way, but it apparently is.
All I cared about was keying the records. Now I don’t know if what I keyed was even recorded.
But don’t despair, I notified my home county website host I would resume keying for them, as a result of my frustrations, and she made an interesting comment about all the Ancestry and the Generations Project problems.
Researching her casual comment took me accidentally to a website where I spotted a similar name, and, lo and behold, I can now absolutely verify my husband’s lineage back to John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower!
And, I have also stopped in the middle of keying sets before, to resume them later, and never had a problem with the records being added.
Thanks for your help. If I hadn’t been so aggravated and vocal about wasting my time, I may have spent a lot more time proving my husband’s suspected lineage. I’m applying for the Alden lineage membership today.
Maybe it was worth wasting my time with the World Memory Archive.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Just a thought.
This project has a large number of pages which are blank or are printed log book pages. When you download 2 pages to key in you often end up with no records and have to download again, or give up.
Would it be worth considering a screening process eg download 50 pages but simply grade as having data or not. The data pages can then be re-entered into the set for keying and the no data ones can be deleted.
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Anna,
For those of us who participate in sequences of several days of keying followed by several weeks of not being available to key, it would certainly help if you include a link in your posts to every place to which you recommend we refer. I know it will take me at least 15 minutes to work my way through the forgotten path to get to the wiki, or to any of the other helpful pages. It would help a lot if you simply added the link to your post. Thanks.
Wayne