Missing places in indexed records in Switzerland
I'm finding a large number of indexed records in Family Tree which are missing event places. The only indication of place is "Helvetia" which is the latin name for Switzerland. Why use this name at all is not clear, since "Schweiz" is a perfectly good German reference to the country. I've seen Helvetia used elsewhere and it is somewhat annoying. Sometimes you can figure out what the place is by looking for the film reference number attached to the indexed record, but why should you have to do this, when the place could easily be part of the record? It looks like one of those "let's change everything with similar names" that went badly wrong that I've seen before, e.g. Sirnach, Thurgau, where the residence and parish were mixed up, or putting Sirnach marriages in Affeltrangen (for reasons that are opaque). This really needs to be fixed.
Answers
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It's not clear where exactly you're seeing this: in Family Tree profiles, or in index entries? They're not at all the same.
Is it an auto-standardization error? By my calculations, there are millions of those in the database. You can recognize them by the existence of two event place fields, one labeled "(original)". That one is the text that was actually indexed, while the other one -- which is often ridiculously wrong -- is the standardized place that the computer chose as matching the indexed text.
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These are in the indexed records themselves. I'm sorry, I conflated two problems. The one was in errors in the changed records, which as you say are often very wrong, though the changes made are very puzzling at times
The chief complaint here, however, is in indexed records (i.e., not in the the tree), which show no other information other than dates and names, with no places given. If you are in a family history center, it can sometimes bring up the digital image, and a little searching will show you the place. As I said, if you look at the document id, you can sometimes tell, by checking in the catalog where the date came from. Often, but not always, once the place is identified, you can match the record to one already in the tree and indexed earlier. It is very strange. I would say that someone went through many of these images and reindexed them, except it looks more like a computer program was working on the original indexed records, but just got it wrong. I went looking for some and found more problems, namely just "Schweiz" or "Switzerland. Some of these are in the Bern area, but also elsewhere, and again, if you bring up the image it shows where they were actually from, but it's not in the indexed record.
Here's a specific example, Hans Jacob Krufs, chr. 2 Oct 1676, parents Hans KRUF, Barbara FRISCHKNECHT, place "Helvetia" - no more. The document number reference is "008014408". Clicking on that brings up a bunch more incomplete records. If you go to the catalog and enter that number, you get a reference to the church records of Urnaesch, Appenzell, Switzerland. Why can't the indexed record show this directly?
I understand that sometimes multiple locations appear on the same film, but normally that is not the case.
Thanks.
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While someone is clearly trying to fix this, they often as not get it wrong. A recent example is the records for Oberuzwil, St. Gallen in Switzerland. Someone is going through and changing the place to Obertoggenberg, which makes no sense, since Toggenberg (and Obertoggenberg) is not a town, but a region or distinct in the Canton of St. Gallen. The pattern I've seen is that after a while the original place is discarded and you see only the incorrect replaced name.. How someone is coming up with these alternate names is not at all clear. If you look at the original microfilmed records, they are quite clear what they are of, e.g. Oberuzwil. The only thing I can figure is that someone is someone extracting places in the parish that appear in the description of the parish records and using those instead. Those places are usually subsets of the parish which are covered in certain later records, e.g. Family books. Thus I see Rauchlisberg or Hemmerswil substituted for Amriswil in Thurgau, even though the parish didn't really change that much, but they are listed as areas covered in later Family Books. The parishes are large enough that the priest couldn't cover the entire parish in these census like records, and so broke them up in the listing, but that says nothing about the parish itself. In the case of Oberuzwil, the description does list Obertoggenberg (in parentheses), but as before, this is not an alternate place or description of the the parish, but only a reference to the region where it is located. Without a little knowledge of the place, this is just foolish. This misguided effort apparently continues and is gradually making it very difficult to work with these records. I'm seeing it all over Thurgau in Switzerland, and also in St. Gallen, but I suspect that this is happening elsewhere in the world where records have been indexed. Only a long familiarity of the records for this area makes it possible for me to continue, but I'm sure others are finding it very confusing as well.
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I'm more convinced that the computer is doing this. If if finds a name in parentheses after the original in the description in the Family Search catalog it makes the change, assuming, no doubt, that the two are equivalent. What is typically happening is that the parenthesized place is simply a qualifier, indicating a subset of the original, particularly in Family Books. I mentioned the case of Obertoggenberg being substituted for Ober Uzwil in St. Gallen. This is an even crazier substitution, since OberToggenberg is the region which Ober Uzwil is found, and there is no city/town of that name. This processing apparently continues. Please, someone stop the computer, or whoever it is, from doing this!
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As Julia explained in May,
Is it an auto-standardization error? By my calculations, there are millions of those in the database. You can recognize them by the existence of two event place fields, one labeled "(original)". That one is the text that was actually indexed, while the other one -- which is often ridiculously wrong -- is the standardized place that the computer chose as matching the indexed text.
The word "(original)" in the extract is the clue. There is an ongoing effort to correct those problems, but it may take decades.
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Without a specific url to a historical record, I found a christening for a Hs Jacob Krüf in 2 Oct 1726, but the record gives a full location in Urnäsch, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Schweiz. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FZ2-WS22
If you have examples of records with the wrong place, please supply to link so that we can look into it. Thanks.
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