Errors in New York, State Death Index, 1880-1956
There are errors in the transcription of the Index. An original image of the Index appears in a window and at the bottom there is a transcription. The errors are in the locations of the deaths in the transcription. Presumably, the location of death should be in New York. The place of death for a person I was looking for was listed on the original as "Kingston" which I understood to mean Kingston, NY which is correct as the person lived in Kingston, NY. In the transcription, however, the place of death was listed as "Kingston, Jamaica." I was curious so I scrolled through the transcription and found many other such errors. On the original, a place of death was listed at "Pt. Ewen" which is shorthand for "Port Ewen", a place name in New York. On the transcription it became "Portugal." Other examples on the same page: "Rch." which is probably "Richmond" becomes "Rocha, Uruguay." "Lafayette" becomes "Lafayette, Louisiana." "Windham" becomes "Windham, Vermont." All of these are New York place names.
Comments
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This is an ongoing problem in all the collections. I do wish that FamilySearch would issue a blanket statement on why it is happening and how they are working to correct it. It seems to be getting worse!
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I started fixing some of these errors, but a search revealed that there are about 100,000 records of New Yorkers who supposedly died in Uruguay (instead of "Rch" which stands for Rochester, NY) and some 95,000 New Yorkers who died in Italy (instead of Syracuse, New York and Rome, New York). I've only recently been seeing so many of these errors, and would guess that these were indexed by a computer program that simply selected the first suggested location, so I'm going to send a request to see if there is some way to at least automatically correct the most common errors. It would even be more preferable to delete the transcribed location for any place outside New York State rather than to keep the incorrect location
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