The following email, which was recently posted on the Troy Irish Genealogy Mailing List, about the Rensselaer County Marriage Index Project of the Troy Irish Genealogy Society may be of interest to members of the Rensselaer County Mailing List. A. List members may be interested in how the work is done on the Rensselaer County Marriage Index Project and who does the work. The following items may be of interest and may trigger more volunteers to help on this major project. 1. First of all, TIGS uses their own laptop computer and scanner. The IBM laptop was purchased with TIGS dues money and the scanner was donated by Jeanne Keefe, the TIGS webmaster. Local TIGS members use this equipment to scan the Marriage Index Books in the basement of the County Clerk's Building on Third Street in Troy. 2. The combined index for Volume 6 and 7, with 4,000 marriages and 8,000 names is currently being worked on. Two sessions of scanning the Grooms names resulted in 231 pdf files which were sent to volunteers for transcribing. Transcribing and proof reading of these 231 files is 99% complete. On May 1, 2008 the first pages were sent to volunteers for transcribing. 3. The TIGS Project Coordinator sends the pdf files and the Excel sheet to individual transcribers. As each page is returned an additional page is then sent to the worker. All returned pages are then sent to a proof reader to double check the data entry. When all the Grooms files are finished they will be sorted in marriage number order and analyzed to identify missing marriage numbers or duplicate numbers. 4. The next step in the process is to scan the 4,000 Brides names and create pdf files to send to the volunteers. This work will be started in the next few days. 5. Work on data entry of the Grooms names has involved 21 volunteers from all over the country. Here is a state by state breakdown of the volunteers: New York State - 13 Albany -1 Clifton Park - 3 Poughkeepsie - 1 Saratoga Springs - 1 Troy - 3 Wynantskill - 2 Williamson - 1 Syracuse - 1 Massachusetts - 3 Pennsylvania - 2 Iowa - 1 Virginia -1 Tennessee - 1 6. As you may know, the following volumes of the Marriage Index with their 32,000 names are currently on-line on the Troy Irish Genealogy website www.rootsweb.com/~nytigs/ Vol. 1 5,000 marriages with 10,000 Names January 1908-April 1913 Vol. 2 5,000 marriages with 10,000 Names April 1913-July 1918 Vol. 3 2,000 marriages with 4,000 Names May 1918-April 1920 Vol. 4 & 5 4,000 marriages with 8,000 Names April 1920-January 1924 7. Photocopies of documents on file OR of the record in the marriage book for these 16,000 marriages, are available from the County Clerk's Office for a fee of $5.00. Separate request forms for EACH Volume with the necessary instructions can be printed from the TIGS website. B. Additional volunteers can always be used to work on the Marriage Index Project. The quicker the data entry process, the faster each index can be put on-line on the TIGS website. Volunteers can help as follows: 1. Become a volunteer transcriber. All you need on your computer is Adobe, which can be downloaded free and Excel. Data entry items are minimal; last name, first name, page number, marriage number and date of marriage. As all the work is handled through email, volunteers can be located anywhere in the world. 2. The following need for volunteers can only be done by capital area residents as the work has to be done at the County Clerk's Office in Troy. As previously noted, the index for Volume 8 does not show the marriage number and the date of the marriage. So, before we can scan these pages, a look-up of the page number in the Marriage Book itself must be made to obtain the marriage number and the date of the marriage for each name on the index. Photocopies of all the pages in the Vol. 8 index have already been made and now we need volunteers to post the marriage number and the marriage date to the photocopied index pages. We will also face this problem when we get to Volume 9 and Volume 10, the last two books of this record series. If anyone is interested in volunteering to help with EITHER of the above items, they can email me off list at seamus@nycap.rr.com . Regards, Bill McGrath TIGS Project Coordinator Clifton Park, NY