Wrong baptism place in records
For this https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZHM-WFBZ entry data is wrong:
The Baptism Place in this record is Sierakowitz, Karthaus, Westpreußen, Preußen, Deutschland but in fact is is Kalkar, Rheinland, Prussia, Germany.
The linked churchbook is correct of Kalkar as it is also availbale here: https://data.matricula-online.eu/de/deutschland/muenster/kalkar-st-nicolai/
When you open the attached curchbook and got to page #267 it shows:
Randomly checking other names from the churchbook page show the same wrong baptism place.
Answers
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Thank you! I have run into this as well! I use Eve Verhohlen's database as my jumping off point and then I've received hints from this random location and it threw me for a loop! Definitely lines up with Kalkar for me. Grateful you posted this!
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There are hundreds of thousands (or frankly, probably millions) of such mis-located index entries in FamilySearch's database. They're caused by a malformed pre- or post-processing step which assigns the location field for every index entry on a film based on the beginning of the film. This is fine when an entire film is from a single register, but wreaks utter havoc on multi-part films, which can have records from different counties or even different countries.
Kalkar is Item 2 on a film on which Item 1 is Karthaus: https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&query=%2Bfilm_number%3A1197705. This means that everything indexed on this film is labeled Karthaus, regardless of which part of the film it's from.
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Is Family Search interested in correcting these errors? Just ran across one tonight that is slightly different - the film's town name is correct, but when you drill down to the actual entries, they are linked to a town with the same name in a totally different area of Germany. This seems to be a common problem with East-West Prussian records.
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When I posted this problem last year I thought that it must be pretty easy to fix this directly in the database as the right ones have 1700ish years while the wrong ones from Kalkar have only 1823-1859. Maybe I expected too much.
As I found that these records can be edited I have just corrected the ones I needed. It is not only that the location is wrong, but names are often incomplete and very often the birth date is taken for the baptism date when it says "birth on 'date' and baptism next day". I also found that when there are twins, there is sometimes only an entry for one of them.
This rather poor data quality is not really helpful for finding things when you do not already exactly know what you are looking for.
By the way, the churchbooks are available in amuch better quality here: https://data.matricula-online.eu/de/deutschland/muenster/kalkar-st-nicolai/
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You are not being unreasonable here, but your request is just impracticable. As Julia says, there are a huge amount of these errors and whilst, eventually, some are corrected, FamilySearch relies largely upon volunteers to undertake much of its work, so cannot provide any assurance on "if or when" individual errors like this will be corrected.
It would be good if we could report such matters to a dedicated section within FamilySearch (at least to "add to the list"), but its limited resources appear to mean this is not a viable option, at present.
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please allow me to give some thoughts to this which might sound like a rant but they're not - more food for thought...
1) I have not requested anything - I reported a (for me major) error in the data about 6 month ago and said in my last post that I thought a fix would be easy directly within the database because the data is clearly identifyable (from my 30+ years experience in big data).
2) You have pointed out that such correction can only be done by volunteers in an unspecific timeframe. That is exactly what we user experience with this data and that's exactly why I also wrote that I corrected the entries I needed - so started the process with this little portion.
3) You mention that there are only limited resources - I guess like anywhere else ... But here is the point: since I use familysearch, the user frontend had changed 5 times - which I think were big development projects - and in my opinion not in all aspects always for the better; but that's all ok. The key for us user is not the front end but the data. And the data is the only real value of this system. With some of these front end changes came also "loss" of data: for example many locations I need are not shown anymore which were available before, in some only years and not full dates are shown. Made the system unfortunately irrelevant for me for many locations. In the statement from Julie and you I can not see that there is a thinking on the need to put more focus an data quality - it's more like we know there is a structural error in the process but it is what it is and volunteers might fix them or not. So there are resources to do big developments but not for data quality for a system where data is the key value. Is that working long term?
I know, putting out my thoughts here will not change anything but you see already in this thread that there are more users unhappy with the data quality. This is something that I think needs to be recognized.
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Just one point of clarification, I commented that FamilySearch is largely driven by volunteer work, but did not directly suggest they (volunteers) would necessarily be used to address this issue. I believe any work relating to this would probably rely on the work of employees - my point being that (because of the amount of volunteer help) actual employees are probably far more limited than if FamilySearch operated on the lines of one of the large, commercial (genealogy) websites.
Other than that, I really agree with practically all you have said. It's just that the organisation decides its priorities "from the top", and if that does not match the wishes of its users, requested enhancements and other suggestions seem to take a long time before they are implemented.
To you and me (and many others) data quality would be an overriding factor in applying resources - i.e., in seeing the vast number of serious errors in its records are corrected as quickly as possible after being reported. But we must remember FamilySearch is run under the auspices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so resources must be primarily applied to meet the needs of the Church members who use its products in connection with their ordinance work.
As we pay no subscription to access its records, I believe - whilst we are still entitled to make suggestions and constructive criticisms - we should not to try to dictate FamilySearch's priorities.
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