Regarding census index entries

Mary-JaneSliterLupton1

I am wondering why in some census index entries there are odd place names entered as birth place when the census itself has no such information. It is very misleading. Here is an example,

NameEventsRelationshipsJohn Coulombe [By the way the name is actually Jules not John]

Principal

Canada, Quebec Census, 1861

Residence 1861 

L'Islet, L'Islet, Quebec, Canada 

Birth 1859 

B Township, Algoma, Ontario, Canada 

His brother Theod.'s entry has this same birth place named. The census record has no such information. The only thing I could see on the Transcription was B. Canada which stands for Basse Canada, or in English, Lower Canada, in other words Quebec.

I found another entry like that in the past week or so that had a totally outlandish place name entered with the birth date.

Since when it is not part of the actual transcription there is no way to remove it as far as I could see.

As if this was not bad enough, the father's name was not even indexed so I have saved the census image to my source box and I will add it to his sources from there with a note explaining that he won't come up in a search.

Thanks for the help, I hope.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This is that "standardizing-on-the-fly" error affecting the Search results list but not the actual index detail page. The indexed field is a text string (in this case, "B. Canada"), but what the results list shows you instead is the top result if you put that text string into the place database's search field. (You're lucky: the result is in the correct country. Often, the only reason it's on the correct planet is that the database only has placenames from Earth.)

Basically, until/unless FamilySearch stops trying to automate placename standardization, you cannot trust anything that Search - Records tells you about "where".

Mary-JaneSliterLupton1

Thanks Julia.