John and Val Turner wrote: > > Dave, Perhaps you would share your reply to Sue to the list as she expressed > my confusion very well. I am not arguing your position - just trying to > understand from someone more experienced in genealogy than I am what the > "qualitative" difference is between the comma or period that always follow > the surname and vol field, and the period that follows the forename list. > If, in your experience, you have seen index entries that lead you to > suppose or suspect that the period following the forename conveys > information, while the other punctuation doesn't (and it appears from your > earlier replies that you have) could you please share your knowledge. My > experience of indices is limited to the 100 or so pages that I have > transcribed and the odd look up for my own family. It had never occcurred to > me that a period that wasn't indicating an abbreviation could be carrying > additional information. >From the indexes that I have examined, it would seem that; 1) There are cases where there is quite distinctly a period following a forename, separate from and different to the row of dots that follow. 2) The use of such a period would appear to be against some but not all records on a page 3) we can conclude that either it means something or is poor typesetting We know that a period following a single letter means that the letter is a contraction of a name to an initial, so I propose a hypothesis that a period following a forename MAY indicate that there are further forenames not indexed Now, if my hypothesis is bunkum, we can easily tell the program at some future date to ignore the periods. If my hypothesis is correct, and we decide as a matter of policy to omit the periods, we cannot go back and have the program insert the periods. We will have lost data. That explains why it isn't correct to omit the period. The question that we are trying to resolve is not whether it is right to lose this data (it isn't), but whether it is realistic to try and capture it, or whether we will lose so much of it through transcribers being unable to see the character, through deliberate omission by transcribers who decline to follow policy, or through transcribers who omit it without even considering that it may have data value, that we are wasting our time. -- Dave Mayall