Indexed record locales out of sync with rest of data.
Some indexed record locales are out of sync with the rest of the data. I have seen it happen elsewhere but let me provide one concrete example:
Marianna Neubauer (ID LVWG-MG9) has a pending hint in which her marriage date and husband are correct but her place of marriage is given as Jastrzembie, Strasburg, Westpreußen, Preußen, Deutschland. She was actually married in Jeleńcz, Tuchola, Bydgoszcz, Poland (Jehlenz, Tuchel, Westpreußen, Preußen, Germany). I have seen the image of the marriage in the parish of Jeleńcz. This suggests that maybe all real Jeleńcz indexed marriages have the wrong place name attached. Please let me know if this can be resolved. Thanks.
Answers
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There is a thread where some of these errors have been discussed with a suggestion for how to get them fixed. https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/391110#Comment_391110
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It is highly likely that, "...all real Jeleńcz indexed marriages have the wrong place name attached".
As far as fixing this type of problem is concerned, mixed feelings have been expressed on this forum. My own expectations remain low. The example below shows events involving members of my STANLEY relatives - all shown as having taken place at Corbridge, Northumberland. I have reported on a number of occasions that these events took place at nearby Alnwick parish, but the issue has never been addressed.
In this case, the records for Corbridge and Alnwick appear on the same microfilm and I believe all Alnwick events (indexed from that microfilm) have been recorded as having taken place at Corbridge. This practice is quite common with FamilySearch indexed records and I have found examples in different counties of England.
My hopes remain low of these specific issues being addressed, as there is no section in the FamilySearch organisation that has been assigned to handle such reports. Well, there might be, but - if so - it has never been named by any FS employee, nor has have ever been a link provided to report these errors directly.
You might be told here that your report will be passed to a "specialist team to deal", but that there is a backlog in correcting such records. I believe my report of the example below was first made about eight years ago, so it does not seem likely that my, or your, example will be fixed any time soon.
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There are multiple things going on that cause large groups of index entries to have the wrong place.
One long-standing error in FS's background processes is the one that Paul mentioned: when a film is indexed, all of the "recording location" fields are filled with the information from the beginning of the film. This causes major and widespread errors when films have multiple parts from different places. For example, there are thousands of Hungarian civil registrations that are indexed as occurring in a different county than the actual location. As Paul said, we have been reporting these errors for many years now, and have never noticed one ever being corrected. I'm also fairly certain that the error is ongoing: I think indexing pre- or post-processing still assigns locations based on the beginning of the film (or digital image group, now).
A newer source of location errors is a background, automatic standard-association routine that FamilySearch hasn't explicitly admitted to (yet, that I know of), but which Gets It Wrong more often than not. Luckily it's usually only a little bit wrong -- a 20th century jurisdiction for a 19th century event, for example -- but sometimes, it's the wrong continent. (Sometimes it feels like it'd choose the wrong planet, given half the chance.) You can recognize the workings of this routine when looking at an indexed record: there will be two location fields, one labeled with a parenthetical "original", which is what the indexers entered, and another one, generally at complete odds with the collection's scope, which is what the computer picked out of FS's database of places (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20).
Áine linked to a Community thread where some of us have been reporting errors of the second type. I have no idea whether anyone at FamilySearch who can do anything about the errors has ever looked at that thread. Heck, I don't know if there is anyone at FS who can do anything about the errors. (For the first type of error, it sure seems like the answer is "no, there isn't".)
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