Richard in Cooperstown, NY

A couple of years ago, our son Richard had the opportunity to go play baseball in Cooperstown, NY on the Doubleday field. Richard had never been one to get overly enthused about sports events, not even baseball but I thought for sure he would get how cool it was to be able to do this. He was in between colleges at the time as he was about to transfer to Florence. There was a chance he might not go since the trip was to take place during tournaments, should his team make it out of Sectionals. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, the Voles didn’t secure a spot on the next tournament and so he parted and headed to Ohio to play for the Delaware Cows.

http://www.delawarecows.com/

So the players whose college teams were in the same situation as his made their way to Cooperstown, NY and it’s only after he visited the Baseball Hall of Fame that he got excited about playing there. A photographer took pictures during the game and we had wanted to buy some as souvenirs for Richard but the prices were out of our range at the time so we contented ourselves with printing the proofs off the computer. Better than nothing but… I went back to the site a week or so ago hoping to see them again and was tickled pink that they were still there and I could still buy them. SO I did. I could not buy all of them as the packages only gave one picture at a time. I bought 4 of them and one will be on a poster. I know that was not the happiest summer for him but I hope he likes the pictures all the same.
The photographer called today because he needed some information to put on the poster. I look forward to seeing them. Breaking into professional sports is not easy.
Richard went on to play for the Lions the next two years and enjoyed playing on USA Field in Millington, TN his first year with UNA. He would have liked winning that tournament but it was not meant to be.
He would have to be content with his Conference ring from John A Logan College in Carterville, IL.
I don't know if he is really reconciled to the idea he may never play again but he has found a positive way to channel his talent by helping coach a team in Indy. Their success will show him that there can be satisfaction in helping others succeed too.

March Ramblings

I am not a political person. Never have been. Politicians too often speak one thing –what they think people want to hear- and then do another, whether or not it is due to circumstances outside their control. But that was my mother’s world for a few years when we were still in Belgium. She still holds a fervent ardor for the rights of workers everywhere and thinks of her father when she hears Michel Fugain’s “Le Chiffon Rouge”. She chokes up on some of the words as she sings it, remembering what he went through especially after the war. He was a good man, one of many whose voice would not have counted for much were it not for the workers’ movements.
Anyway… I just finished listening to the Lincoln-Douglas debates and they have stirred up a lot of thoughts within me. That was about another group of underdogs… I remembered reading that Joseph Smith and Stephen Douglas had been friends and Joseph had even prophesied that if Douglas would not turn his back on the mormons, he would become president. Well we all know Lincoln won the election. So these debates had an added meaning to me. What was Stephen Douglas like?
The Stephen Douglas I found in the debates seemed like a good man but someone who would go with the flow rather than take a firm stand for what he really believed in if it meant becoming unpopular. As I listened to the debates I told Bruce I could not imagine how Lincoln could have won against him and his sharp tongue. Well, truth is, I didn’t realize Lincoln had actually lost that election but it set the stage for the presidential election a couple of years later.
It’s good to want peace but peace does not mean the absence of problems and it should not be kept for the sake of not stirring up trouble. When something is wrong, it is important to stand and speak out.
If the Founding Fathers had not stood against tyranny, would the USA exist today? Who knows, but as they well put it as they signed the Declaration of independence, they would either be victorious together or hang separately, rebels that they were, according to King George anyway…
Yes, it’s all in who tells the story…
When we went to Washington DC back in 1984 to be sealed in the temple as a forever family, we also toured the sights and of course visited the Lincoln Memorial. The huge white monument made you feel so very small…

The recent election of the first African American president and his use of the Lincoln Memorial as a prelude to his taking office stirred up a lot of emotions across the country, especially from the descendants of the African slaves.

He even retraced Lincoln’s train ride from Philadelphia to Washington
"It is one of the great, patriotic symbols of our country," Presidential Inaugural Committee spokeswoman Linda Douglass said of the location. "It's a symbol of the American spirit; it's a symbol of unity; it's a symbol of our values. So for all those reasons it's an appropriate place to celebrate an inauguration that is really built around celebrating our common values as a people." And how right she is to say that!
One of the reasons I was naturalized is that I believe a people should have a voice in who rules the country they live in. Then I was told I had to register with a party. Instead of studying each party’s current platform prior to registering, I opened the Encyclopedia to learn about the roots of the two main parties and discovered Abraham Lincoln had a hand in creating the Republican Party.
I also didn’t miss that the US presidents who had turned away the Mormons’ pleas for redress against their persecutors, were both Democrats. Sounds like a stupid reason to register Republican but that was my reason.
I don’t trust my vote to a party, I give my vote to the person I think is a better person, the one who will do the right thing for the right reason. No ego trips. I did find this simplicity in Lincoln’s debates. I don’t know how he was able to remain quiet as Stephen Douglas pushed the envelope and took things out of context for the sole purpose of bringing Lincoln down. I can see how some people would fall for Douglas’ words yet at the same time I can’t imagine how anyone would not see through his game.
Stephen Douglas has a memorial too, in Illinois.

tomb of Stephen Arnold Douglas in Chicago, Illinois located in the approximate area of the former Camp Douglas (POW concentration camp).
Photograph and upload by John Delano of Hammond, Indiana.
Photograph taken 8 October 2006 CST/UTC in Chicago, Illinois

Would Barrack Obama have become president had Lincoln not won? How different would things be?
President Obama’s inaugural speech was strong. Time will tell what his presidency will bring. Much hope is riding on him. Will he be able to get things right? Only time will tell…
He does feel like a man ready for action though and that should be a good sign as America needs to regain the respect of other nations. It will take time… hopefully not too much.

Adventures in Indexing

It was in September 2006 that I registered as an indexer for FamilySearch indexing.
I had seen a PowerPoint presentation saved in pdf format given at the 2005 FGS Conference announcing the plan to digitize all the records preserved in the Granite Mountain.
http://www.familysearch.org/eng/home/News/frameset_news.asp?PAGE=Press/2005-9-9_FGS_Presentations.asp
Quite an ambitious project but what amazing possibilities it projected!
I signed up and started indexing census records along with a growing number of other volunteers throughout the country and before long throughout the world.
It was simple, in fact much simpler than the old way we used to use to participate in the old Extraction program. This way your work is submitted directly to Salt Lake. They organize everything.
Back in 1998-1999 our Young Women had shown an interest in extracting records and we had had to contact Salt Lake and accepted the challenge to tackle records from Argentina. Some of our Young Women were studying Spanish but for most of us – and even for them – it was a challenge to deal with the handwriting, let alone the Spanish.
We received a microfilm that had to be divided up, into batches that would not be overwhelming and organized these batches into microfilm indexers and data encoders. We also had to prepare a sample record so that those who were taking the information off the original records could find their way.
And because this was part of a special Laurel project we had to keep track of the hours spent on all this.
The records were death records from Cordova, Argentina. There were a lot of infants in those records, and there were slaves too… This prompted me to try and contact someone in Argentina who could give us some background history on the records and the area. We were in such luck! The lady who answered our request was working on the original records and so she could even help us if the images were bad.
She explained that the Indians were protected by the Queen Isabella and could not be held as slaves. So the slaves mentioned were African slaves. More questions came up when we found slaves married to free people and we learned that a child always took on its mother’s status. So if the mother was a slave, even though the father was free, the child was deemed a slave. However if the mother was free and the father was a slave, the child was free. Slaves could also buy their freedom, in a very similar way that the Romans of old used to.
Yet we never saw the product of our work become available to all.
So the prospect of working together with so many other good people on a project that was going to make records accessible online had great appeal.
At the 2007 FGS Conference held in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I found out how to participate in a project that was and is much closer to my heart than the US census or Argentinean records. They had just opened an indexing project for Belgium. Since this project was still in its trial period, it was not listed among the projects people could pick a batch from. It required a special log in and the project manager had to give his ok.
To my disappointment the project only had records from Flanders but there were French ones as well as Dutch ones. I could find my way through the Dutch ones but felt much more comfortable with the French ones so I stuck to them.

Later that year I was called to serve as Stake Indexing director and I became an arbitrator.
So I juggle 2 logins and wear 2 hats: a regular indexer with the Belgian project and an arbitrator/administrator for my stake.
I like arbitrating most of the time because it doesn’t take as much time to go through a batch but each project has special rules and it is important to read the project specific instructions.
Lately I have spent most of my time on the Antwerp Foreigners index. I index for the Belgian project and I arbitrate for the stake in the same group of records. I think there is a prerequisite to doing this work. It’s to have the ability to decipher old handwriting. The projects are in various languages too now and so it is better to stick to project in a tongue that is more than just familiar. You need to be fluent in the records’ language if you want to keep yourself from being frustrated. The words sometimes just jump right at you, but not always…

The trick with the Antwerp Foreigners Index is to first disable the highlight as it jumps right to the next page and does not take into consideration that there are 2 columns for each page.
When I arbitrate these batches I sometimes find some half way done and it is obvious the highlight is the reason as only half the page is indexed, 30 names on the left and 30 names on the right.
When that happens, I have to return the batch to be reindexed by whichever indexer who didn’t complete the task fully. I suppose I could just check that the one indexer did the work right but I was told an arbitrator should not think or act as an indexer so to keep things the way they were intended to work, it is simpler to just return the batch so it can be completed.
Sometimes an indexer also needs to return a batch because the image is too light. At first I used my Ancestry.com subscription to see if there was not a better copy of the image that I might be able to read its content but I was told this was not a good idea as poor images would end up online with the index and would not be of great value. By returning the batch and signifying the image is of poor quality, the indexer ensures that the image is retaken.
I love the site where the product of our work is being deposited: http://www.familysearchlabs.org/
Click on “Record Search”
In fact you can access it directly from http://www.familysearch.org/. Just hover over “Search” and you will have the option to click on “Record Search”
The work I do with the Belgian Project is only tallied by and for that project. There is a plan to consolidate IDs and add the totals, but until that time, the only number recorded for me as work for my stake is the one under which I serve as Stake Indexing director.
We do have indexers but I am still a one-man band as no assistants have been called to help with training indexers or helping with increasing the number of indexers.
I have asked several times to no avail. If I had less worries with my family I would probably approach local groups but the timing is all wrong for me so… I am waiting for the local leadership to step up to the plate and do something. When things calm down for me, we’ll see…
Until then I’ll just keep indexing… It’s a very rewarding thing to do and sure beats playing games online!