Missing places in indexed records in Switzerland

Jeff Felix

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.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

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.

Jeff Felix

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.