If there is one thing that stands out with this mission I am doing, it is the records of births and deaths that I deal with on a daily basis. The down side is that I do not know or even can guess what has happened to these individuals between the event of their birth and the eventual death. I suspect that some of the people had a real challenge with each step of the way and others just sailed through with little or no problem. It seems to be so unequal, but on the other hand, the challenges we face bring us to the point of growth and expansion of our vision of life.
Last week I was asked to do compassionate service for a member of our ward. She is the caretaker of an 8week old baby whose birth circumstances were less than optimum or desirable. She has been staying at the hospital helping care for him ever since he contracted RSV - a virus that affects the lungs of small children and even can affect adults with compromised lungs. I went over to the hospital to be holding the little one upright so that he has a better chance of good breathing while the caretaker/mother went to an appointment. I walked into the hospital and was greeted by a helper volunteer who took me to the pediatric ward and as we walked to the elevator the sound of Brahms Lullaby came over the loud speaker. The helper turned to me and smiled and said, oh, another baby has been born. I was in a state of awe at the thought of a new life entering mortality. I don't know what it is to give birth, but rather know what it is to go out and adopt, so I am quite emotional to know that another little one has joined us in mortality. Each week there are pictures in the paper of the newborns, not all of them make it into the paper, but about 15 to 20 newborns are pictured in the local paper each week. Mostly boys with just a few girls seem to be born here. I was at the hospital about 2 hours and in that span of time Brahms Lullaby played 6 times. It was a busy day in the maternity ward. The juxtaposition of world wars, political upheaval, climate problems, various and sundry strifes against the newly born occupied my mind while at the hospital. I held the little boy in my arms and watched him struggle for breath and I wondered what was ahead of him. He has had 8 weeks of struggle already. He has been living in my friend's home now since he was one day old and he is greatly loved by the other children living in the home, but what happens to him if he is returned to his nuclear family is anybody's guess.
I have been doing indexing of records. I have to achieve over 2,000 of these indexes and then they tell me I will be an arbitrator of records. An arbitrator in this sense is one who decides whether the written record is written to reflect this fact or another fact and then the record is released online. I guess it needs explaining. Each record that is up for indexing is separately indexed by two people. Their best guess (especially for the hand written records) is then fed through a program in a computer where they are compared and if there is a disagreement, then the record is turned over to a person to arbitrate. For example -one record I indexed I looked at very closely and the date was 19th of March. However, the second indexer thought it looked like 13th March and both records were sent to arbitration and it was decided that 13th March was correct. I even checked the 1860 calendar to see what day of the week both days may have been and found that both appeared as a week day and not a weekend. And so it goes with arbitration.
Many of the records I have indexed this week have been birth records from Tasmania, Australia. Why anyone would want to live in Tasmania is beyond me, but then I suspect that there are people who wonder why anyone would want to live in Toowoomba, Queensland, for that matter. I now live in a high desert area and there are people from Phoenix who escape up here to the mountains during the summer to beat the heat of Phoenix.
The type written records leave no question as to what is fact but the hand written records take a lot of close scrutiny. One record of marriages from New York took me 6 hours to index the 40 marriages there. The handwriting left a lot to be desired.
At the Family History Center we deal with the census records a lot for patrons looking for clues to their family history and the writing and spelling defies deciphering. I am told that the original transcription of the US census' was done in a non-english speaking country and the guesses were pretty much off as to what was actually there that the Family History Library in Salt Lake City had them all re-done by English speakers and the present records are a lot easier to cope with and are type written.
I have been assigned a mentor who is given the responsibility to train me in the intricacies of this mission. I meet with him almost daily online through Skype and he teaches me what to do and what to avoid. Some days I think it is more akin to walking on eggshells.
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