Indexing and identification of filmed records

Jefferson Wessler

I am concerned that some of your indexed films from Germany may be mislabeled. Case in point, my paternal great grandmother's family were definitively Catholics from Sandhausen in what was the Kingdom of Baden (now part of Baden Wurttemberg). I have obtained their Catholic baptismal records through FamilySearch and now I am finding duplicate records labeled under the title "Lutheran Baptisms". Specifically, film number 102550500. Please advise because this is disconcerting to say the least.

N Tychonievich

@Jefferson Wessler Would you please provide us with a URL showing the erroneous entries? Or at least a collection title or search path so we can see what you see and be better able to troubleshoot? Thank you.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This is yet another example of the problems caused by FamilySearch's malformed film-labeling process on a multi-part film.

Film 1188253 (digital image group 102550500) has two parts. Item 1 is the Protestant register-duplicates from Sandhausen, while item 2 is the Catholic register-duplicates from the same place.

FamilySearch uses the record information found at the beginning of the film to fill in all of the event fields associated with that film. Since the beginning of the film is Protestant records from Sandhausen, that's what it says in all of the index entries associated with this film.

There are hundreds of thousands of such errors in FamilySearch's database. The really depressing part is that as far as I can tell, this same badly-broken process is still being applied to newly-indexed material, and in fact, it may be applied in indexing as well. (That would explain why someone was asking about an obviously-Catholic register page as part of the Hungarian Jewish vital records project.)

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@N Tychonievich, here's an example: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPDW-B4HG

If you look at the associated image, you can see that yes, Eva Catharina is there on image 306, but if you go back to image 303, you can see that these records are from the Catholic parish of Sandhausen, not Lutheran like the collection title says.

Jefferson Wessler

Then WHY isnt the title of the collection changed/edited to reflect that fact? You are contributing to the confusion of your users. Didnt think that was something your organization would strive to do.