1820 Name Unindexed - is there a way to fix this mistake

BrandonHassett

Greetings,

I'm going through an 1820 census and it appears that a volunteer skipped a name while indexing.

I'd like to add this, but the edit button only allows me to fix names previously indexed. Is there a way to add a name?

Thank you

Paul W

The problem with records that are "indexed" is that you can be lulled into a false sense of security. For example, I'm almost certain my ancestor was buried in a certain parish, but FamilySearch (or another organisation) has indexed all records for that parish, his burial is not in those records, so he must have been buried somewhere else. Not necessarily - as you have found, the indexer just happened to miss that entry. Sometimes it's a whole page that has been missed / skipped, but no, FamilySearch is not going to arrange for a recheck in order to get these reported, missing entries added to the database.

Where possible, you must always try to consult the original records, rather than rely on an indexer who - being only human - might have lost concentration for a moment and missed your ancestor. Getting to see the originals can be very difficult, of course, so there must be many researchers who have given up on ever finding a record, whereas it might be where they suspected all along - just "lost in transcription"!

Julia Szent-Györgyi

No, the index-editing feature on FamilySearch does not allow the addition (or deletion) of any fields, and in my experience, there is nobody at FS who has both the time and the authority to make individual corrections to published indexes. (There are vastly larger errors that have gone uncorrected for at least a decade, and with the recent autostandardization flustercluck, they've added millions more.)

If you know where the unindexed person is in Family Tree, you can attach the image to the profile using your Source Box, bypassing the flawed index. If it's just a random person on a random page you were looking at, then you just have to hope that the person's relatives don't stop at the index in their research.