Thursday, January 27, 2011

A Different World

So, I'm working on my indexing for FamilySearch.org, and at the moment it's New York Marriage Records from 1918. They're fairly basic and straightforward. Name of groom & bride, their age, date of the wedding and their parents. Pretty basic. That's all that they want for indexing, but there is more information on the forms.

Right above the spot for "age" is a field for "color". I've been happily indexing along and today noticed that this one field had been filled in with "color"... So it was Color - Color. And I thought... color of what??? Color of hair, eyes? No... This is the United States... Elsewhere, the Color field usually had "white" next to it... But in this case, it was actually "color". Which could be black, tan, polka dot or chartreuse. That doesn't matter. In the US at that point, you were either white... or color... No other distinction necessary.

I think of how far we have come since then... And how far we still have to go in other areas.

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