Obituary Board

Here are the steps to work on this project. Thanks so much for contributing. If you want to see what has been done so far, review some posted here. You might notice that there are a large number of obituaries already posted and done by a large variety of contributors.

If you have any issues with the steps I am giving, please ask me for help. (Use the link in the footer to provide the email.) These are new instructions, and there may be mistakes or assumptions that I am making.

1. First, take a good look at what has already been done: http://iagenweb.org/boards/marion/obituaries/index.cgi.
2. You may choose to work on this project because you want to include some of your relatives or perhaps just to help others. If you wish to work on this project, please email the coordinator (see footer) and let him know which year you will work on or what your goal is.
3. Go to http://pella.advantage-preservation.com to find the digital online newspapers associated with Pella. If you are looking for particular names, enter them in the first search field and specify the dates within which you expect this person. If you wish to just work on a specific year, click on the decade in the Browse By Year section. This should bring up a pop-up window where you choose the year within that decade. [Note that this website sometimes changes its user interface, and the following instructions may not be quite right. This also assumes that you are working systematically on a particular year. If you are working sporadically, adapt accordingly.] Start with January and proceed forward. When you pick a month, you can then also choose the date of issue. The obituaries tend to be near weddings and on pages 5, 6, 7, or 8. However, in some earlier years, there may have been other patterns (or no pattern). Note that sometimes there is a table of contents on page 1. Sometimes, page one also has other deaths, if it was an unusual event, so it is a good idea to start on page one. Once on a page, there are arrows at the top to move forward or backwards (also on the side of the window) or a drop-down menu to choose a particular page. Note that there is also a search facility on this site. Check the "retain current filters" checkbox if you have drilled down to just one date and have not yet found the page with the obituaries. Then search for the following words: (in this order): die (handles died and dies), death, cemetery, funeral, passed away, obituary, obituaries. Very likely, you will find the page containing the obituaries. Eventually, you will find the first obituary for that issue.
4. At this step, I assume that you have found an obituary in the newspaper that you chose to start with. While it doesn't hurt to have an entry in the index twice, you also might not want to waste your time. To check to see if your name (and its transcription) is already in the index, go to http://iagenweb.org/boards/marion/obituaries/index.cgi and use the search facility near the top (only searching Marion Obituaries and only for Surnames, the default values). Check to see if your candidate is already included.
5. If your candidate is already included, then check out the next obituary on that page by using the previous step. If your candidate is not included, you may find it useful to actually download the page that you are viewing on pella.advantage-preservation.com to your computer. This will make it easier to view your obituary and the others on that page. To download the page, use the fifth icon from the left that is at the top of the page. It is a down-arrow pointing to a black rectangle (your computer). This will download a pdf with the newspaper title, the page number (sometimes wrong, so check on the page), and the date of publication (again, check at the top of the PDF or on the website to be sure). After opening the PDF, zoom in on the text of the obituary you wish to transcribe. Make the text as large as you can to easily read it. Here are three ideas for how to transcribe the obituary (though there may be others - if you have another idea, please let me know):
   1. Literally transcribe the obituary by typing into a text editor (any sort, including Word) the words that you read from the obituary.
   2. An alternative to this, if your computer has this ability, is to turn on the Dictation option of your text editor (wherever you type) and then just read the obituary out loud. To make life easier at edit time, it helps to know to read out things like "comma", "period", "new line", "left parenthesis" and so on.
   3. My favorite approach is to use a tool that performs OCR (optical character recognition). I use a Macintosh and my favorite tool for this is the free app TextSniper. I invoke it by typing a particular keystroke combination when my mouse is over the PDF and this gives me a modified cursor to more easily mark off corners of the desired text by dragging from one corner to the opposite one (while holding the mouse down). The tool then tries to convert the selected image into text, so paste it into your text editor. I am guessing there are tools for Windows as well. Let me know if you find one.
   After the transcription has been completed, you need to check it for errors. Compare your text against the image and keep refining it. This is easier with a crisp scan but can be some work for a poorer image. So, sometimes, I don't use the third option given above if the text is not clean. I tend to use the second approach then. Please add blank lines between paragraphs to increase readability. Finally, at the bottom of the transcription, add the source. I tend to place this in brackets to make it clear that it is not part of the transcription. For example, here is what I included for my father's obituary: [St. Cloud Daily Times (St. Cloud, MN) 21 Mar 1985 Thu p18c2]. Key ideas are paper name (location), date published, day published, page #, and column #. To do a final proof check, I often ask my text editor to read the text to me while I read the actual image, and errors become more visible when it is read out loud.
6. Now that you have a clean transcription and you have added the source at the bottom, we are ready to add it to the Obituary Board. First, if you need to review the steps used to add a transcription, do that first. Otherwise, here is the link to post an obituary. Until you get into the groove of posting a transcription of an obituary here, I recommend that you first look at the Preview before you actually Post it.
7. If you are only entering the obituary transcription, then you are done with this person, and you can go on to the next person in the current newspaper publication. If you have also chosen to add to the index of obituaries in Pella newspapers, then proceed with that. Instructions are here.
8. If you find that you need clarification here, please let me know, and I will add it here.