If the instructions say to fix misspellings of place names, but it's unclear what the real name is?
Sorry for the confusing title; I ran out of room!
Basically, I'm doing an Irish batch ( [Part A][M3Z5-T5R] ) where the instructions say in regards to location: "You should expand abbreviations or correct misspellings when you can tell what the abbreviation stands for or what the correction should be to the spelling." Which seems awesome, but it's actually difficult.
Lots of the locations are fine, some are mildly misspelled (sometimes with odd abbreviations), but some are so wildly misspelled that I can't figure out where they are talking about.
For instance:
This is a location that is supposedly in County Cavan, Ireland, 1850s. I see this as Deubawn or Denbawn, possibly Peubawn or Penbawn. However, there is NOTHING in the township listing for Cavan that ends in bawn. There is nothing in the locality listing that starts with Pe at all, so I went to the D's, and the closest I can find that MIGHT be this is Dennbane. Which seemed too far off, so I googled townships NEAR Cavan, and there was NOTHING even remotely like this, so I go back to the Dennbane. It doesn't seem right. But it's the closest. There's a strong accent and 19th century pronunciation and spelling rules possibly throwing off my interpretation, so what do I do? Do I put in Dennbane? Perhaps "Dennbane (?)" Leave it blank? Mark it unreadable? What?
Answers
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When I tried with chrome I got: Denbawn, Carrickaboy, Co. Cavan, Ireland. listed in the Irish property register.
I don't know if that helps any. Hope it does.
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Ah, so the township listing included in the instructions isn't to be trusted. That helps somewhat. But that was just an example, the core question still stands: if I can't figure out with any surety what a place name actually is, do I make a close guess, leave it blank, mark it unreadable, or what?
I will not post any more examples, though there are many, because I don't want to confuse again.
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Do the instructions mention that if you cannot determine ... that you should "type what you see"?
I think that is the general instruction. If place names change and are not on the provided list - I just type what I see (mispronounciation/spelling and all).
It appears Dennbane has had other spellings over the years (this is probably another instance):
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No, sadly, the entire instructions consist of what I quoted above: "You should expand abbreviations or correct misspellings when you can tell what the abbreviation stands for or what the correction should be to the spelling." Nothing about what to do when you CAN'T tell what the correction should be to the spelling. There's no field validation list, though, so I have no idea what the standard protocol would be.
I suspect they say this because, unlike names, they have a verified place listing this connects to, so that records will be consistent and make searches easier. Which is good in many ways, particularly when searching. But when the place name changes or has a lot of spellings, it's a nightmare, both in trying to determine what to write down, and in searching for records, and it's not the fault of the transcriber, the researcher, or even the software engineer trying to find a good middle ground. It's just hard. As someone who has done a fair amount of database work, I wish they had a name atlas that had the current name, but also had a background database that listed all of the alternate spellings/names. Like, based on what you found, I could type in Deinn Bán and the system would validate it as an alternate spelling of Dennbane, and tie it enough to Dennbane that a search for either would come up. The biggest problem with that, though, is that from the township list I could tell there were a TON of names that were very similar, and sometimes a township name would show up multiple times!
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As you mentioned this County Cavan Project does have the locality listing - that is to be used to compare what you think the location is:
In this situation where - without consulting other resources (as mentioned https://www.logainm.ie/en/) it is difficult to determine many times. Spelling I believe at some of these times was more phonetic - so could vary from scribe to scribe - thus one of the causes for many of the variants for place names.
Unfortunately there is not a FamilySearch place name authority - such as you mention that would be nice to validate against- but there is one that users can contribute to and make it more complete (including alternate names). Here is the one for Dennbane:
Unfortunately, although I and likely others have previously suggested it - I don't think the pre-indexing processes for FamilySearch indexing Projects - do this 'geo-tagging' of locations. It would actually be another type of indexing - in my opinion to make the indexing projects 'as accurate as possible'. People with more local knowledge of places may be the best to do this type of indexing. It would be nice if the place indexing were a 'separate indexing pass' - because of some of these types of difficulties (the group could be language/location experts for example).
So in this circumstance where I like to include the alternate names - I don't know what is best - but I like to capture the variant spelling from the record. Hopefully someone at some point can sort through and add all the variants to build a better place authority for future projects.
Perhaps a moderator can comment - I am almost certain they will repeat the instructions = 'if you can determine what the place is use the place on the locality listing' - if uncertain I like to default to what should be in the 'general indexing instructions for place' - 'type what you see' (the default for most indexing fields - to capture the original record).
Just an expansion on some of my thoughts.
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Yes, that's what I'm facing. I went over the locality listing, and Dennbane was the closest possibility. So perhaps I can write "Denbawn (Dennbane?)" and that would cover what I see AND what it might be from the locality list provided. It would be nice if a moderator chimed in, but we do what we can do.
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I mean if FamilySearch would like the Indexer to suggest these alternate spelling/names to https://www.familysearch.org/research/places that will just cause the indexing to take even longer but could help the places database (if non-expert additions don't cause more trouble). I don't think this is regular indexing process though...
All I am pointing out here is that - as I have suggested before - it would be nice for places of an Indexing Project to have been completed (bounded localities to the map) prior to the rest of the Indexing occurring. This would be better for Places 'authority' and for the indexer unfamiliar to the place names of the Project.
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Agree, with 1 caveat: most locals don't know alternate names of nearby areas from even 50 years before. 150+ years ago means that even going local will have a low chance of a clear and accurate answer. Historians, possibly. Average citizens? Generally not.
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