INDEXING – It’s much more involved than it seems.

Right now, despite the season, what is most on my mind is the index for the book Susan Bates and I have written on French Santee A Huguenot Settlement in Colonial South Carolina. The copy is due at the printer sooner rather than later and if all goes as planned, it should be published by mid-March and will available at the Huguenot Society of South Carolina and other local bookstores. Hence, my focus on the index – the book itself is 395 pages and the index so far is up to an additional thirty pages and it’s only partly completed. I spent most of Thanksgiving marking entries and seem to have spent almost every minute since then doing the same thing when I’m home.  Forget mowing the yard or anything else which I’m actually not supposed to do, because in the midst of the indexing, I found out I have a degenerate disc (my term for it), so I’ve actually only been indexing off and on as the pain ebbs and flows. Unfortunately, when I asked the doctor what had caused the disc to degenerate, he replied, without any hesitation, “Old age.” We discussed his lack of a sympathetic chair side manner, but the diagnosis didn’t change. I don’t think the pain medication has had much influence on the index – and it hasn’t had much influence on the pain either, for that matter, and sitting in a chair or car can be excruciatingly painful.

But back to indexing. Since we want researchers and family members to be able to find their ancestors, many of the names and words have to have several index terms – women who married, some several times, are especially time consuming and lists of names can be daunting. I end up telephoning Susan several times during the course of a day to ask questions as to how we should enter some term. Since she is more of a minimalist and I am more inclusive, we have interesting conversations at times. Most center around how to spell a name: DuBosc, DuBose, Dubose; Estienne, Etienne, Stephen; Pierre or Peter and was Bruyere/Brueis one person or two? Will people look for occupations under Occupations or under the individual words? Does anyone start out looking for brazier or vitner? Do we index the words merchant and planter every time they appear? Do we set up a category for countries and list all the cities beneath them or simply index the names of cities individually and add the country?

We did look at a number of indices and made our decisions before I began our index and I do have a sheet outlining what we decided, but it can get confusing. You’ll have to wait for the book to find out what our decisions were. Despite all the hassle and time it takes, it is exciting to see the index as it grows day by day. It’s also a bit worrisome, because it is taking an enormous amount of time, but we haven’t missed the deadline yet, so we are still on tract.