Locations included in Marriage Records from Slovakia
It is wonderful that the Marriage Records from Slovakia have now been indexed. Thank you.
However, the Marriage Location for all records seems to be Slovensko, Czechoslovakia.
It would be much more useful if the location actually showed the location on the page of the film.
For example the following page is from Krajné, Myjava, Slovakia
I assume this could be done either on a document or page basis.
Thank you, Charlene Herring
Best Answer
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For your specific case, all of film 4528603 is from the Lutheran church in Krajna, Nyitra county, so everything that Search - Records coughs up for this film took place there, regardless of what the index says or doesn't say. Even if the index were to get corrected, this wouldn't change. That is, even if all of the event location fields were specific and correct down to the exact church, they'd all be the same exact church.
To restrict a search to a film, put the film number in the "Image Group Number (DGS) or Film Number" field. You can get to the same thing via the catalog by clicking the magnifying glass icon next to the film number (or next to one of the items, if it's a multi-item film). There are apparently over 33,000 entries indexed on film 4528603 (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.filmNumber=4528603). You can restrict it to marriages on the film by using the Marriage filter (in the row of gray bubbles at the top of the results list); choosing "marriage place = continental Europe" brings it down to 9,490 results. That's as granular as you can get using the location. To narrow it down further, you can filter by date, or you can add some people's names in the search fields.
I've seen conflicting statements on these forums about whether indexes can be flagged for correction or not. In my experience, very large indexing errors -- those that affect an entire collection -- sometimes do get fixed, but I have never seen a location-specific error that was corrected. I would, of course, be very happy to be proven wrong.
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I noticed a similar thing in some records from India which were being indexed. The records came from an area in India roughly covering one third of the county, so long distances involved, yet location was not one of the fields captured in the indexing process, as determined by the indexing instructions. I commented at the time, and from memory the reply was that the location could be seen on the actual image.
I wonder whether it is an American bias, as I get the impression the records for America have the location available in great detail, where as locations elsewhere, at least for some record sets, currently appear to be only indexed on a country, or large area, basis. I think it would be much more helpful to include the location when the records are being indexed.
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I am simply a volunteer, I do not work for Family Search - that said, I am a proud American with relatives ancestors and friends who live in Venezuela, Costa Rica, Africa and Australia --- some of my ancestors fought in the US Civil War for both the North and the Confederate Armies. My Dad and 4 of his 5 brothers fought in WWII. One died in a submarine in the Sea of Japan. Some of my friends fought, died or were taken captive in Vietnam. I went to school in California some of my friends were Japanese, Chinese, etc. One of my sons and a grandson served in the US military. I am tired of hearing about "American bias." Can we not accept and believe that each of us is engaged in the important work of preserving family and world history for our descendants and that each of us is simply "doing the best we can" given the talents or education we may have?😎 Thanks for listening.
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The Slovakia Church Books are an ongoing indexing project, and no, there is no place or location field in the indexing. That's supplied somewhere in the pre- or post-processing.
Based on the ongoing autostandardization flustercluck, I suspect that what's happening is that the process that's supposed to fill in the location based on the film cataloging data is failing to find a standard, and instead of flagging the batches for human attention, they're just getting set to the modern country as the standard.
As a workaround, you can restrict your search by film number (e.g. https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.filmNumber=4528603&c.marriageLikePlace1=on&f.marriageLikePlace0=5&c.marriageLikePlace2=on&f.marriageLikePlace1=5%2CSlovakia); this will narrow down the results to just whatever churches are on that film. (Yes, that can be more than one.)
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Thank you for your response.
I was able to restrict the search to the film number (I think) by setting the marriage location to Slovensko, Czechoslovakia. However the number of results are still a bit overwhelming.
1) Is there a way to flag the index for human attention at this point to correct this?
2) Is there a way to narrow it down within the film number (perhaps with batch number?) (I suspect not or you would have mentioned it)?
Thank you, Charlene Herring
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Thank you.
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I'm late to this conversation, but I was having the same problem and decided to look here before sending feedback asking someone to fix the location names. Slovensko, Czechoslovakia isn't exactly helpful as a location when you have to click on each of the hundreds of records to see where it came from! Some of the records with no photo don't even have a more detailed location in the boilerplate record.
Since the addition of church or village names appears to be a post-indexing piece, might I suggest the powers that be focus on doing simple update queries for the films that only include one location before worrying about films that need to be split? You'd probably get 80 percent of them that way and relieve the frustration and complaints for the vast majority of users.
For anyone reading this who hasn't realized it yet, not all of the Slovakian marriage records have been indexed. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out why a marriage I was researching in Nálepkovo didn't seem to exist, then discovered that only one section of the marriage records on that film were included. A later section of marriages in the same film is unindexed as of this writing, and there are numerous pages of births where the left page in the image is indexed and the right page is not. This is true of the Hnilčík records, as well.
That said, I'd like to thank all the employees and volunteers at FamilySearch for making this information available over the internet! It may be imperfect, but it sure beats the old stamp, handwritten letter, and SASE my mother had to use for her genealogical inquiries forty years ago!
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@RebeccaKaluza, even if the image is unavailable, you can use the catalog to identify the location and denomination (or at least narrow it down to a few, if it's a many-item film). See my reply in the "Eastern Europe" Group for a specific example of doing so: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/137750/locating-the-origin-of-a-record-found-online#latest
Given FS's ongoing trouble with locations -- you basically can't trust anything that the indexed records database says about "where" -- it's best to do one's research here the other way around: instead of starting with a search by name and then filtering that down to the correct place, start with the film/image group and search it by name. And, as you say, always keep in mind that not everything on a film is necessarily indexed.
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