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Joanne L Williams

RIPoole

We will send this to another department. It will probably take a good while for them to fix it. You should hear something from them.

Paul W

@Joanne L Williams

Don't hold your breath! In responses to similar requests, FamilySearch Support is advising that no such changes are being made at present. Even changes to errors in the FamilySearch Catalog are on hold for about a year.

Many users are upset by FamilySearch's reluctance to make prompt changes to incorrectly titled or indexed collections, but the organisation has limited resources (compared to commercial websites like Find My Past), so has to face difficult choices in prioritising how these resources should be best used.

jeaneliasonlyman1

I won't hold my breath, but I hope someone with sufficient time and authority will start changing the location back to either the original "Craig-by-Montrose" or to the government correct "Craig." The location is definitely not "Montrose," a different parish, The error started several years ago.

Paul W

@LymanJohnLeslie1

I sincerely hope this matter will be dealt with, but from personal experience I know that such requested changes are rarely made. I have been asking for many years for corrections to wrong parish names and others have asked for changes made during a "standardization exercise" to be reversed, as they have meant a different country is now shown as a suffix to the place name. Maybe one day FamilySearch will have / provide the resources to correct the huge number of examples like yours, but certainly not right now.

RIPoole

This is not a Catalog error. This article explains why Catalog errors are not currently being fixed: How do I request a correction to the FamilySearch Catalog? This appears to be a computer generated error and those are being currently fixed. However, there are a lot of them and it may take some time.

Paul W

If anyone has any recent experience of an item like this being corrected please advise us here.

My understanding, from a message I received from Support, is that all these changes (not just ones related to the Catalog) are on hold. To show that users' hopes of these matters being addressed are not false ones, please share actual examples (not necessarily very recent) of where corrections have been made.

I'm sure the moderators are responding in good faith, but we really do need evidence that it is worthwhile in reporting these computer generated errors.

Paul W

@RIPoole

I am pasting my comments from another thread (of 26 August), as these seem to make it quite clear that FamilySearch is exploring options regarding how they will deal with these issues in future, but are not undertaking any work, at present. So, you (and other moderators) are telling us these "are being currently fixed", but "Support" is advising otherwise.

(See https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/371473#Comment_371473)

Here is the response I received on this issue, from Support on 24 August (my italics for emphasis):

"We wanted to follow-up to let you know that corrections to the indexed place for the Record Collection: England, Northumberland, Parish Registers, 1538-1950 are not currently being made. A team is evaluating our record collections and exploring options to make such corrections in the future. 

Meanwhile, when you use a record as a source and the index has errors that are not editable, we suggest that you edit the source--after you attach it to an ancestor. To do that, from the list of sources for a person, click View Source for the item that has the error. Then click Edit. From there you can edit the title to more accurately reflect the content. 

We apologize for the indexing errors that are in our record collections. We hope that corrections will soon be more widely available."

The two sections italicised make it clear the reference is not just being made to my specific problem with the Northumberland collection, but there is currently no facility in operation to address these (metadata) issues (although this is being evaluated).

I am just worried that the advice still being given in Community - for FamilySearch users to report their examples here - will create false hopes, at least of any short-term fix regarding these errors.

Paul W

Interesting to see a "Legacy" thread (in which I participated) has just been added to Community / Ideas from the former getsatisfaction.com forum. This dates from 2015 and shows the same frustration being expressed then as now: no formal way of reporting metadata errors and no system in place to address this matter.

See https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/42413/transcription-errors-reporting#latest