Scanning vital records indexes is a time-consuming task. I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours scanning index books over the last six months, and came up with some ways to make the scanning go much faster. I'll share the thoughts in hopes they will save others time in this sometimes mind-numbing task.
One of the obvious keys to saving time is not to scan more pages than you need to. The entries in index books are always pretty much in order by date. If you are looking for somebody's parents' marriage, look backwards from that person's birth date. If there is an overlapping index book which is alphabetized but you have to look at some of the entries in a non-alphabetized index, only scan the unalphabetized entries from (or to) the date where the alphabetized index ends or begins. That only takes you so far, though. Beyond that, you need to apply some special techniques for reading quickly.
One technique that is taught in speed-reading classes is to use your finger to guide your eyes as you read. I tried that when I was going through index books and found that it helps quite a bit. When I read down an index page, my eyes for some reason want to naturally catch on names for no reason whatsoever, and then I find myself reading a name and the names below it at a much slower speed. It's probably the same for everybody. When I use my finger or the eraser end of a pencil by running it down the left margin of the page or even above the names, I make a point of letting my eyes follow the pointer. I have to make sure I don't start moving the pointer so fast that I am not actually seeing what's written, but I think I turn the index pages significantly quicker when I am using a pointer like that because it just keeps my eyes moving. I never saw anybody else doing that when I watched other people scanning indexes at courthouses. I think it's a good idea. Give it a try.
By the way, if you use your finger, try not to actually touch every page rubbing your finger down it. The oil and acid on your skin comes off and destroys the paper over years.
Another thing I found was that it's important to avoid actually reading the names. The handwriting is often in an unfamiliar style. If you go down the page mentally looking at every name, determining what it is, and then either moving past or staying because it's a name of interest, you'll be going way slower than you need to. Even if the writing is easy to read, reading the names really slows you down; when it's a little hard for us to read, it's even worse. Rather than actually reading the names, look at the writing as a form of artistic pattern. You know how the name you are looking for will appear. Instead of looking at this big long vertical column of artistic patterns and seeing whether every pattern either matches or doesn't match, just look for the patterns that match and don't process the ones that don't any more than absolutely necessary. I have to say, I didn't figure out that this was a good idea to do - I simply found one day that I was scanning the indexes very quickly and I analyzed what I was doing. This is what I figured out. It's probably a little hard to follow, so an example is definitely in order.
The name I was looking for was Harrington. Here is how the pattern of the name can be described:
I had the pattern firmly in my mind. Not the detailed facts I just listed above, but the actual impression of what it looked like. Of course it's my own name so it was automatically firmly in my head. A person could probably get a different pattern in their head most firmly by writing the name in cursive script neatly a number of times in a column going down a piece of paper and then scanning it over with their eyes several times. Each time you'd write the name, you'd finish it and look back at what you'd written, paying attention to the general appearance. Getting the pattern firmly in your mind is important.
Once the pattern is in your mind, you can scan away. With each name you see, you take that pattern, not the individual letters but the pattern of shapes, and pass it through a mental filter in your head - does the pattern match? Almost always it's "No." Discarding the "No" patterns isn't a conscious thing. It's kind of like dropping sand through a seive. The ones that are too small fall through the seive without you doing anything to make it happen. That's the names with patterns that don't match. Some of the grains of sand are too big to pass through the seive, and there they sit for you to examine as you like. That's the names that do match the pattern, and your job is simply to catch them so they don't fall through the seive. After you catch them, you have to stop and take a close look - actually read the name to see if the letters are exactly what you're looking for.
Another completely analogous example is in what you do when you come out of the grocery store and look for your car in the parking lot. You don't look at every vehicle and say to yourself, "That's a pickup - that isn't it. That's a compact, I have a big car, that's not it. That one's red, and my car is purple with pink polkadots, that's not it." Rather, you just scan your eyes extremely quickly over all the vehicles. You might see one that kind of looks the same as yours and you have to get a little closer to make sure it's the right car. If it's not, you move on and eventually you see one that looks like your car and, sure enough, it is your car. That's exactly what I'm talking about doing with names in an index. You don't expend effort in carefully analyzing at details of the cars or names you aren't interested in - they are discarded instantly without consciously thinking about it.
The actual scanning and mental processing is very fast. You have to make sure your eyes hit every name, but you do not stop and think about each name. You move your finger down the page and keep following along, searching for the right pattern. I found that I could do a good job of processing a typical index page in about four to six seconds. When I was scanning most efficiently, if you'd asked me what were some of the names I'd seen I couldn't have told you a single one of them unless I'd found a match to the pattern.
In speed-reading, they say that sub-vocalizing the words you're reading is a big no-no. With this name scanning, if you're pronouncing the names to yourself, then you're definitely reading each name instead of just looking for similar patterns, and you'll be better off if you force your eyes to move along faster than you can sub-vocalize.
It was interesting to observe in myself how the matching worked. Though I was looking for Harrington, my eyes would stop at Herrington, Harrison, Hetherington, Barrington, Herring, and other similar-looking names. The mental pattern-matching was obviously not exact - Herring doesn't have the 't' sticking up above the other letters, and Harrison doesn't have anything hanging down below the line, for example, but my eyes would constantly catch on those names because the pattern is close enough to signal a match to what I was looking for.
At first I was quite worried about going too fast and not processing all the names carefully enough. I had visions of scanning whole index books and finding nothing - especially when I was finding nothing - just because I wasn't looking closely enough. However, on three separate occasions I had independent verification that I was not missing any names. I'd get the verification when I made the mistake of not checking to find all the indexes before I just started scanning. On three occasions I scanned a whole index book and afterwards found an alphabetical index that covered the same names. When I looked for Harrington in the alphabetical index, I found exactly the same names I had found in my scan, no more, no less. As I gained practice I was able to speed up even more, but there is definitely a limit. In a manner of speaking, your eyes are taking little instantaneous mental photos of the names as you run down the page, and it's as though there is a limit to how fast those little photos can be taken. Too fast, and you wind up skipping names. And then your mind has to process those little photos while your eyes keep going and take more little photos. If you go too fast, your mind gets behind in its processing and you start missing things, because those little photos don't stay around for long.
It may seem odd to think of it this way, but that seemed to be about what was happening. When I was going quickly, time and again my eyes would catch on a name, but it wasn't actually my eyes that would catch. Rather, it was my mind sending up a flare, "Hey, you just saw something," and by that time I'd be about five names or more further down the page. I'd have to back up and look at the names carefully to find the name that had set the flare off. So the processing was definitely going on after I had seen the name.
I've always been a good reader, but this is a sort of "reading" I've never done. I'd think others can do the same thing. Maybe you already do and didn't need to hear about this technique! I sure did see a lot of people going laboriously down index pages, obviously reading every single name, though. If you are going to do much scanning of vital record indexes, it's definitely something you want to try to develop because otherwise when you go to courthouses it takes you a lot longer than it needs to, so long that you may wind up having to make the long trip back a second time when, if only you'd been able to scan faster, you'd have been able to spend that day (and money) doing something else.
I'm sure that the exact pattern you're looking for makes a difference. If it's less distinctive you probably have to go slower because there will be more potential matches to your mental image. But if you can somehow avoid actually reading every name, you'll be way ahead. No matter what pattern you're looking for, there will be plenty of names with patterns that don't match.
One thing about this method - it requires focus. If there are noises, you'll be distracted. Distraction puts a halt to the lightning-fast mental processing you're doing as names fall through the pattern seive. If you don't stop your finger movement and go back to pick up the names you just went past while you were distracted, you'll be skipping past names without processing them, and thus possibly going right by the very name(s) you're looking for. After maintaining the required focus for a couple of hours straight, I'm tired, and I'm sure anybody would be. If it's too tiring, one can always slow down or do something else for a while - go look up some of the records you culled from an index and copy information or something else for a bit. But just always be aware of whether you're actually doing the processing the way you mean to, or not.
One very interesting thing I noticed was that it's really pretty easy to switch patterns. All you have to do is keep the new pattern in your mind. For example, though I was looking for "Harrington", sometimes I'd be thinking about "Sullivan," another related surname for me. All of a sudden my eyes would start catching at Sullivan just like for Harrington. Another surname I would look for was "Unbehaun". That's a pretty rare name. More than once my eyes would catch at Unbehaun even when I wasn't thinking about it. However, I did find that it was very difficult to literally look for two names at the same time using this filter method for names. Essentially, looking for two names is like mentally constructing two different pattern seives and putting everything through both of them. Whatever catches in either one is of interest. I was able to succeed at this, but it was quite a mental struggle for me, and I really had to slow down significantly. I doubt I could have employed that fast scanning method at all if I was looking for three names simultaneously. That's one distinct limitation of the method.
