Breakfast, in this sad case, is a trial run of the new (to me?) "Boca in a Bun" chick'n/Swiss sandwich. The "chick'n" is fine, the Swiss is tolerable, but the bun did not exceed the usual results of nuking frozen bread that was probably not very memorable even when fresh.
And the Shreveport Charity Hospital is what's happening in another window. I'm transcribing death certificates from the end of July 1938, all of Shreveport Charity Hospital patients. Seventy years later almost to the day. Oo. Spooky.
You can tell that I've been out of the loop with genealogy. I totally missed the fireworks announcing that the LDS has created a way for anyone to very easily transcribe their records at home. Records that will shared with the world, free of charge. Records that, thanks to 140,000 people signing up (!!!!), may be completely online in 10 years.
Ten years. That's nothin'! WOW.
I learned all about this in a recent MetaFilter post. I signed up within the minute.
This isn't the first time someone has made a clever, automated, shared transcribing project for genealogy, though. (Not including your regular transciption volunteers who've always been around. Dude. I did at least four county censuses. It was not fun. And, 13 years later, you'd have thought that the whole census would be online for free by now, but that kind of solo eyestrain never really caught on, I guess. Also, the census is huge.)
In the 90s, I remember an outfit that showed scans you could transcribe. Scans of very long pages. After each page, you earned a few more minutes of database time, so you could do your own research. Kind of like how people used to book computer time thirty or forty years ago. (Often a vital element of setting in so many sci-fi novels. Oh, how Dr Fronkensteen could save the planet, if only he could get book than 30 minutes of access to the mainframe! Why, that was hardly enough time to wind the magnetic spools...)
I can't even remember the name of the site. Maybe it had the letter K in it?
But what the LDS is doing - golly - it's amazing. You can choose which project you want to work on, the data entry isn't overwhelming, and the Java-powered app used for viewing and typing is light and elegant.
The fruits of the labor so far are searchable here.
It's nice to have an alternative to the high prices at Ancestry.com. (Where every few years I renew my membership, but only when they offer a rare sub-$100 uber-deal.) Ancestry needs to take a page from Origins and learn this phrase: "DAY PASS." I did several generations' worth of research for Mike's Scottish/Irish ancestors with Origins day passes and was able to order birth and death certificates very easily directly through the site. And this was years ago - probably almost 10 years. The search engine on Origins was great. I love that Ancestry is there, and I have no problem with them earning a profit, but it's not perfect. Maybe the surge in progress with the LDS FamilySearch site will light a fire.
So, this is how my morning is going so far. (Mike is asleep, dreaming of how much gold my rogue tailor is costing our guild since she just learned how to make imbued netherweave bags. As always, sorry for the World of Warcraft geekery. And if you're a WoW geek yourself, that's right, my rogue is a tailor, not a leatherworker. Because I am just that cool and shortsighted.)
The death records are filling my mind with images. It's unsettling, seeing them in context, where they are presented chronologically. I've finished everyone for July 22, so now I have a mental snapshot of life in the Looziana ward that day. An old single minister lady visiting from Illinois, coming in from a car accident, with no one to know the name of her momma or daddy. A "colored" man, in his sixties, not divorced but "separated from Mollie," whose surgery went wrong with a perforation. The attorney with his mother's maiden name as his middle, whose condition is obscured by elite doctor scribble.
It's fascinating. But right now I have a married woman who has died as a result of some intestinal obstruction. She's had a hysterectomy five days before. Her name was Rosie and she was only 50. Her husband knew both her parents' full names and birthplaces.
A long time ago I made Mike memorize all of that kind of thing. I don't want any embarrassing half-assery on my death certificate. I don't want to be pulled back from the joys of the afterlife (where, as I've probably mentioned before, my Aunt Kathy once assured me involves all-you-can-eat ice cream sandwiches) because I have unfinished business what with no one writing down where my mother was born.
(I want the hospital name in there too, Mike. And be sure to find a way to mention that I spent my first week of life alone in an incubator. I remain convinced that half of my personality developed as a result of spending that bonding time as a human hot dog on a warming tray. Yes, it's a short line, and it's dotted, so I suggest making stickers in 4-point type and offering them to the coroner in a nice presentation folder that includes some of my scrapbooking mats so the death certificate will be a bit more, you know, me. In fact, let me put that on my To Do list. I don't want you having to mess with glue dots during "this difficult time.")
Yuck. I just transcribed a certificate for a 16-year-old girl who died because of a "serum accident" at the hospital the day before.
Can't say I'm putting "1938" on the short list for time machine coordinates. Not without my bottle of Tylenol III and that special cough syrup I got from my Chinese Dr Feelgood. (Although, come to think of it, you could probably order that cough syrup right over the counter at the soda fountain back then. My mom was a pharmacist's assistant during high school in the early sixties, and she has lots of stories about the people who would come in for their daily "dose.")
And now there's this man, age 54 and married, an oil operator, died of "suicide by poison," followed by "pheurl" (?) in parentheses. What's that? And here I am, starting to Google these people. Trying to find out more. Don't I have enough of my own people to look for? And why didn't that guy have an autopsy?
Here's a premise for you chick-lit mystery writers: person starts mindlessly transcribing old death certificates. Starts getting all Nancy Drew with it. Finds conspiracy, drama, misunderstanding, reconciliation... until lure of Belgian chocolate calls (big blocks on sale for $1.99 at Fresh & Easy!) followed by usual overdue sleep.
(Great, I just did one where they died of their gallbladder operation. I won't read too much into that. But I will put down the chocolate.)
(And now I have one whose cause of death is "grammatin by firearm." I know I'm reading that wrong. What by firearm? Or is it "traumatin"? Traumatized? I wish I could show you, but I didn't actually read the Terms of Service, so it's probably not on.)
And so, the first batch is done and submitted. This is right up there with old postcards for getting the imagination all swirly. Next time I might try the San Francisco mortuary records. My apologies to everyone who would finally like to see the complete census online for free, but, for me, for the moment, it's these death records that are keeping people alive.
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