Major Indexing Error in 1930 U.S. Census (Specifically Bristol, Virginia)

Andrew J Tryon

I was attaching sources to some distant relatives when I found that most (if not all) of the records in Bristol, Virginia from the 1930 census are indexed as Bristol, Rhode Island.

Naturally, this makes it almost impossible to search for relatives in this area in 1930. I only found it through searching Ancestry and finding the (correctly indexed) source there, then looking through images on FamilySearch.

Is there a quick way to fix this, or will people have to go in and manually edit every single record here?

Gordon Collett

I checked a few of these and it looks like they all have and Event Place (Original) Bristol, #, Bristol (Independent City). So this is not an indexing error, it is a post-processing error from a routine run some months back to take incomplete place names and complete them. This automatic routine has caused widespread errors in the historical databases. It is being reported a lot.

For example, see:

--- https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/450647#Comment_450647

---https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/436564#Comment_436564

I do hope they figure out a way to fix this major problem.

N Tychonievich

@andrewjasontryon1 Thank you for pointing out the error made by the auto-standardization tool in identifying Bristol City, Virginia as Bristol, Rhode Island in the 1930 census for the United States. We have reported the error to our engineers for correction. We are not able to predict how long it will take for a correction to be in place.

Andrew J Tryon

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.