Confusion with Galicia, Spain and Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire Reporting

Dave Olinyk

I've noticed a slight problem with the display of Birth Location in basic Search Results. Specifically, from Canadian Census records where the birthplace on the source document is only listed as "Galicia", the Search Results default to "Galicia, Spain" even though the vast majority of individuals in the Canadian Census records that report their birthplace as Galicia come from either today's Poland or Ukraine. Perhaps the default display in the results should simply be "Galicia". In my mind is is better to be less precise than wrong.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

Can you share a link to a specific record? This sounds very much like the placename standardization program that went off the rails. You'll see MANY threads on the topic.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

More specifically (to what Áine said), this sounds like the on-the-fly variant of autocorrup::ahem, sorry, I mean::autostandardization, which affects the search results display, but is not reflected in the individual index entries when you look at them on their own page. Basically, the index field has a text string -- in this case, probably "Galicia" -- but instead of showing you that string, the search results display whatever the Places database produces as a top result for that text string.

As you can see, the Austrian crown land (labeled "state", I guess because they're minimizing the number of different place types?) is third on the list, so even though it's probably the correct choice at least nine times out of ten, that's not what the on-the-fly standardization chooses.

What I really don't understand is why FamilySearch feels it necessary to make the search results display lie to us like this. What's wrong with just displaying what the index actually says?

pamela_boston

Here is an an example of the same thing. These people are not from Galicia, Spain. Individual records do not show any reference to Spain, but the Events column in the search result, defaults the location to Galicia, Spain. https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.anyDate.from=1877&q.anyPlace=galicia&q.birthLikeDate.from=1877&q.birthLikeDate.to=1877&q.birthLikePlace=nasiczne%2C%20lisko%2C%20galicia&q.givenName=johann

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Oy. It's even worse than I thought. It's going for Spain even when the index explicitly says that that's

wrong: a birthplace indexed as "Galicia, Aust" is still displayed as "Galicia, Spain".

It's falsifying "Austria or Galicia" as a specific place in Spain.

And all of the plain "Galicia, Spain" displays are hiding an actual placename.

("Norvy" is clearly a misreading or typo for "Nowy", and the place should display as some historical jurisdiction for Nowy Targ, Małopolska, Poland.)

Again I ask: FamilySearch, why in heaven's name is the search results display falsifying information like this? What possible purpose do these false places serve? Why isn't it displaying what the index actually says?