Correcting location of Burke Co, GA records
Miscellaneous records in the office of the Ordinary, 1787-1918Author:Georgia. Court of Ordinary (Burke County); Jones, John J.; Georgia. County Court (Burke County)
the individual entries in the index show Australia rather than Georgia
Answers
-
Weird: this looks exactly like the auto-standardization errors that we keep seeing more and more often, except there's only the one placename field. (With a place on the wrong side of the globe in it.) Normally, the error-generator (oops, sorry, I mean standardization routine) plops its choice in a new placename field, and keeps the original input in a field labeled with a parenthetical "original". Are they now also running the routine in index processing, without a backup of the human input?
I expect the human input on these was just the county name: "Burke county" or even just "Burke", because indexing instructions are almost always "type what you see", or some variation thereof. The "Georgia" part of the equation should have been supplied in the post-processing, except it clearly wasn't.
The reason I don't believe this was a human error is that 4,233 records were not all indexed by the same person. There is no way that even two people both failed to notice that Georgia and Australia are on opposite sides of the world, never mind the probably hundreds of people who contributed to this index. (I can just barely imagine all of the indexers making an error, but all of them making the exact same egregious error? Not possible.)
0
