Preussen, Deutschland death records in Switzerland
I'm encountering a large number of indexed death/burial records for individuals who lived in Switzerland which are put in "Preussen, Deutschland", i.e. in Prussia in Germany. Following these to their source shows them all coming from the parish records of Sitterdorf, Thurgau, Switzerland. Since it is highly unlikely that so many from there died in a place hundreds of miles of away, it seems clear that this is an indexing error, caused by whatever source. I note that there is a Hohentannen near Sitterdorf, and also one in Prussia, and it is possible that the software just defaulted to the one in Prussia for some reason. Unfortunately, I've already seen examples of where a Family Search user, seeing the connection to Germany, has made some erroneous assumptions. In one case there were couples of very nearly the same names, one living in Germany, and the other in Thurgau, Switzerland, and someone assumed that they must be the same family, even though there are a number of conflicts in records for the two. It turns out that individual in the Switzerland family have a number of these false "Preussen, Deutschland" death records associated with them. I don't know how this can be fixed, but it is clearly causing problems as it currently is.
Answers
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It'd be helpful to include a link to an example. Here's one: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:ZBWG-TZW2
This has all the hallmarks of an auto-standardization error, except that it's missing the telltale parenthetical "original" -- but I think that may be because the fields have been relabeled: it seems to me that what was indexed is the "Death Place", which says "Sitterdorf", while the wrong country appears in a field labeled "Death or Burial Place".
Meyer's Gazetteer says there's no place named Sitterdorf anywhere in Germany; the closest they get is a village named Sitter in Hannover (Prussia) and another named Sitters in Pfalz (Bavaria). Oh, and there was a homestead named Sitterheide in Rheinland (Prussia). And in fact, on the search results page, all of those "Sitterdorf"s are expanded to "Sitterdorf, Thurgau, Switzerland".
Did it not occur to someone at FamilySearch that there's something wrong with a database in which dozens of people died in Switzerland and were buried a few days later in Prussia?
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There's a place named Sitterdorf, Thurgau, which is the parish. It's also referenced as Zihlschlacht, which is where the Evangelical Reformed church is located, but, e.g. the parish censuses call the parish Sitterdorf, and Zihlschlacht only one of the towns in the parish. The Catholic church is located in Sitterdorf, however, and that's what you get if you look in the catalog. I can easly see that an automated process would get confused by this. There is a Hohentannen, Thurgau, which is one of the towns in the parish, and also a Hohentannen in Prussia. I don't know just how this happened, but this is the only connection I can see. I've seen this a lot, where the name of the parish is mysteriously changed in the indexing process. Thus, Amriswil, Thurgau, Switzerland becomes Hemmerswil, Amriswil, Thurgau, or Rauchlisberg, Amriswil, Thurgau, even though the parish is Amriswil, not one of the others, which are towns in the parish.
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This makes me think of my question -- why would people from Prussia get married in Switzlerland?
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