Please fix - Maine Death Index

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Find a grave Index or Billiongraves index.

Bob Wylie

Maine Death Index, 1960-1996 is an index in the state of Maine for those who died in the state of Maine. If you would like to fix the problem at Family Search, you will need to have someone go through their index ion your website and change all of the entries from towns in Canada, California and for other states & countries for the towns your volunteers have mess up. Maine assigned an Affiliate Code for each town in Maine. The problem seems to be that your volunteers are using those codes as if they were Postal Codes, I assume.

Here's the latest one I've run across:

Maine Death Index, 1960-1996

Name S E Campbell

Age 85

Death Date 09 Nov 1960

Death Place Castine

Affiliate City Code 09080

Certificate Number 6009114

Castine is a city in Hancock county, Maine. Maine does not post deaths occurring in other states. What FamilySearch has indexed Castine, Maine as is:

S E Campbell

Principal

Maine Death Index, 1960-1996

Death 9 November 1960 

Castine, Darke, Ohio, United States 

Note: This is what you find when searching S E Campbell who lived & died in Maine.

I hope this gets to the right person as I have struggled to find the right place to post Feedback. Way too complicated in comparison to the old days using FamilySeach.org.

Like I said, this is the latest. Their are hundreds & hundreds of others if you care to look through this file.

Bob Wylie

While I'm at it. Please consider adding a drop down menu for each state's files as we search for someone in Maine for example. A menu that perhaps has a search box for whatever state or country you want to search in. If I'm focused on someone who lived in Maine, I don't need to be distracted by information of someone who lived in Cambodia. It will simplify our searches and hopefully speed them up a bit as well. I'd love to see you go back to the old system.

Thanks! Bob

Gordon Collett

One way to do this is to use the location specific search:

This brings up the Maine research page. Using the search boxes here automatically limits your search to just the 103 collections of Maine records. Or use can use the check boxes beside each collection list to further limit your search to some of these collections.

But like so many parts of FamilySearch, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task.

Use the More Options link on the main search page to open it then use the Location open to limit your search to a single state:

These both work quite well with the exception that some of the automatic post-processing of some indexes caused problems with the place name. I tried some quick searches and some obituaries that just mentioned Portland the the post-processing put it in the wrong state.

Bob Wylie

Indexing Errors: The state of Maine only indexes those that occur in the state of Maine, yet many towns in Maine are being indexed as being somewhere else other than Maine. Here's an example for you that I took a screenshot for you. The town was indexed as being indexed in the state of Washington. Below it you will see the same town with it's proper county & Maine. These all through your entire system for Maine Indexes, Maine Vital Records & others. Hope this helps so others may search without them being confused by all the errors. The link below is the link where you will see this for yourself.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.anyDate.from=1942&q.anyPlace=maine&q.deathLikeDate.from=1988&q.givenName=daniel%20e&q.surname=chase

Thanks,

Bob Wylie

Maile L

Thanks Bob. I have reported the error. We do not know how long it will take to be fixed. Thanks for your patience.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@Bob Wylie, no, these were not indexed as being somewhere other than Maine. That 1988 death, for example, was indexed, correctly and simply, as "Edgecomb". The erroneous place in the search results list is being supplied by on-the-fly autostandardization, which is a process that for some inexplicable reason appears to incorporate zero data validation: it does not check that a Maine death index was definitely not referring to a place in Washington.