If you’ve done New England genealogical research for any period, you probably have run into a reference text that was created through abstracting (transcribing sections of) a record. Often these texts include an index as well. Such text include Connecticut’s Barbour Collection and Rhode Island’s Arnold Collection. Once, these texts were considered a standard part of what would be included in the application. Today, things are complicated…
What are the pros and cons of using such texts in an application?
The pros are straightforward: such texts are easily accessible (they typically come up in an Ancestry search); they’re easy to read (as they’re typed instead of handwritten); and they often pull together multiple records on a single page. In short, they make the application faster to prepare and review.
The cons are multiple. First, current society standards have made reviewers unclear if such collections can be used and often confused about how to use them. Around 2016, societies started to ban the use of indexes. Historically, applicants had been allowed to submit an entry from an index instead of the record itself, which was often harder to access. The reasoning was straightforward: the records were now becoming more accessible and contained more details. Unfortunately, education on what constitutes an index, an abstract, and a transcription is often lacking in society training. Abstracts are frequently confused with the banned indexes. Second, even when they recognize the collection as an abstract, reviewers are often not sure what they contain or how they were created. At this point, Find A Grave is familiar to reviewers around the country; Connecticut’s Hale collection, which contains transcriptions of tombstones often no longer standing, is sometimes red flagged.
Seeing recent trends, I’m starting to lean towards not using the common reference texts whenever possible. They seem to be adding additional issues, rather than resolving them.