Indexing and its purpose

After waxing the cats, I proofed and indexed the rest of Part 2.

Indexing this book is a little weird, because the standard advice is that you don’t index a name mentioned in passing. So, yeah, my grandad says something about Marlene Dietrich, and I don’t index it, because it’s not like he knew her or has anything important to offer.

But when he writes something like, “Yesterday Fred Smith told me that Joe Blow is in Africa,” and that letter has a date on it….then I feel like I should index Joe Blow, because his family might be very interested to know where he was and when. So I’m indexing a lot of trivial mentions of non-famous people, but then again, I kind of feel like giving people access to information about relatives who haven’t had history books written about them is why I’m bothering to do this damned index in the first place.