Error Report - Auto Standardization - Folden, Nordand, changed to just Nordland.

Gordon Collett

Example: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:687Y-J3ZM

Here the original place name of Folda, Folden, Nordland, Norway under the auto-standardization process was stripped of its parish and clerical district and left with just its county of Nordland.

In addition, the citation for the record clearly states that this particular record came from Sørfold parish (the Norwegian archives uses the term local parish for this), in Folda clerical district (the Norwegian archives uses the term parish for this) so the original place name is actually incorrect and should hav been Sørfold, Folda, Nordland, Norway. It would be good if that error for all the records from this parish register could be corrected.

N Tychonievich

@Gordon Collett From your image page link, I clicked to see a record details page for one of the entries and looked at the citation. I'm not finding where the citation states that the record came from Sørfold parish. Before I can send this for correction, I need to be able to see the evidence of the correct place. Can you help out? I can't read the original document, so am a tad handicapped. Maybe you could grab a screenshot and circle or highlight the place. Thanks.

Gordon Collett

Be happy to:

In the source description, the place names are listed as the larger division then the smaller.

This calls for some explanation. The actual Norwegian words are Prestegjeld and Sogn. The Prestegjeld was the larger division and were made up of one to three or four Sogn. Both words actually just translate to Parish in English. To differentiate the two, FamilySearch chose to translate these as Clerical District and Parish. The Norwegian National Archives chose to translate them as Parish and Local Parish. To add to potential confusion, almost always the main Sogn in a Prestegjeld would have the same name as the Prestegjeld.

So the most complete way to say where this church book is for in the order they would customarily be written in genealogical records would be:

• The original Norwegian: Sørfold sogn, Folda prestegjeld, Nordland, Norway
• Literal English translation: Sørfold parish, Folda parish, Nordland, Norway
• Norwegian Archives English: Sørfold local parish, Folda parish, Nordland, Norway
• FamilySearch English: Sørfold parish, Folda clerical district, Nordland, Norway

All of which would typically appear in the indexed record and in Search as:

• Sørfold, Folda, Nordland, Norway

Gordon Collett

I've noticed something before that is a bit unfortunate which I'll point out here. The reason you could not, @N Tychonievich, see the actual place name for these records in the image was not because you are not familiar with the records. It is because it not listed there anywhere. When this set of images was posted with these indexed records, the original GSU microfilm was trimmed. Page 1 in the image set is actually page 5 of the microfilm and the book:

Since this book covered just one parish, the only place the parish is named is on the title page. To see it, I need to go to the Norwegian Digital Archives posting of the entire GSU microfilm:

and go back a few pages:

Fortunately indexing process did include this title page information in the Source Description as I noted above.

N Tychonievich

@Gordon Collett Thank you, thank you, thank you! I feel educated. that gives me all the info I need. I've written this up for the engineers. As always, we have no idea when to expect a correction to be in place. Really appreciate your patience and willingness to provide all the info we need to try to improve the records.