Volunteer Activities at Family Search - Improve FamilySearch Place-Names
Over the years I have visited this activity on several occasions and never really understood what is being looked for. My routine is always the same, I open the package, I select either Bristol, England, or Gloucestershire, England, or Somerset, England, occasionally I select Swansea, Wales.
I am then offered ten 4-3 FS identities, if one of the ten is even in the United Kingdom, I consider I’ve had a good visit.
Why is it not possible to define a smaller area such as a county of a town or a city that I might have local knowledge of. But to be consistently offered locations in the USA with the occasional one in (say) southern America, leaves me completely non-plussed.
Can anyone explain what the purpose of this particular ‘Volunteer Activity’ is?
JohnG_Swansea, Monday, 25 July 2022.
Best Answer
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I am not connected with FamilySearch, and am not a church member.
If you go to the Search at the top of the Family Search website, and select Catalog, then use 105187 in the resultant Search (by Film Number)
you get a page https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&query=%2Bfilm_number%3A105187 which shows 5 items. The sample two I clicked on showed me, as a non church member, a camera icon with a lock above it, meaning viewable with restrictions. If I click on this icon, I then get taken to a page which says
- To view these images do one of the following:Access the site at a family history center.
- Access the site at a FamilySearch affiliate library.
If you are a church member, you possibly may get a different message.
If you are not a church member you will need to view the record at a FamilyHistory Center run by FamilySearch, or at a FS affiliate library which may, or may not, be geographically convenient for you. Alternatively you could request a copy through the Library Look up Service https://www.familysearch.org/en/family-history-library/record-lookup-service
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Answers
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Chicken and egg: the whole point of the exercise is that these are places that the computer hasn't been able to identify. It can take a guess, but as you've seen, that guess can be completely wrong nine times out of ten.
The idea is that human beings can be better at pattern recognition than computers, especially if they're familiar with a particular subset of patterns. For example, if the Canadian clerk misread the groom's birth certificate and filled in his birthplace as "Ugudrar (Hungary)", then the computer can (hopefully) figure out to present the problem to someone who chose Hungary as his/her area of interest, and then said someone (me) can fill in that it's actually Ujudvar, a village in Zala county, Hungary.
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FS Volunteering 2022-07-26 Standard Location
Julia, Thank you for your reply
I understand completely, and agree with, your comment:
The idea is that human beings can be better at pattern recognition than computers, especially if they're familiar with a particular subset of patterns.
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Julia, yesterday, prior to reading your reply, I asked for a further list of FS 4+3 identities, one of which was: MYGS-RXL which when it came to screen, I knew immediately that something was wrong. I suspected that Pembroke needed changing to Pembrokeshire
I next brought MYGS-RXL to my screen and opened the ‘Christening, Edit’ button entered the correction which has now (second time around) been accepted.
I next searched for sight of the original document to discover that FHL Film 105187 is where the image is to be found.
I have since carried out a further search this time adding 105187 to the last-but-one box at the bottom of the search enquiry template. The outcome was inconclusive.
Please how do I obtain access to FHL film 105187
JohnG_Swansea, Tuesday, 26 July 2022
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My understanding from the wording is that we are expected to fix user entered places on the family tree - ie: fix someones slap dash sloppy research on the tree that they are too lazy to take the time to do themselves?
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Wowweee THANK YOU Maureen!
One or two slip-ups along the way, but back a page, and try again, until I reached a page with a Pop-Up in the middle looking similar to the Pop-Up you described.
Next step off to the FamilySearch affiliate library here in Swansea, Wales, UK (also known as Swansea Central Library) and see what level of progress I make.
Thank you again, JohnG_Swansea, Tuesday, 26 July 2022
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@gary_noble, most of these entries simply pre-date the current system, and that's why there isn't a map location associated with them. Back when they were entered, the event location was a plain old text field, and there was no attempt at connecting the field with the places database or map. A lot of them are actually taken verbatim from an index entry, moved over in Source Linker ages ago and not touched since.
Another source of unstandardized event locations is a bug in Source Linker: when you add the event location, it claims to have picked a standard, and everything looks fine and dandy, but it fails to save the standard and the place shows up with the red exclamation mark on the profile. If the user who attached the source doesn't go back to look at the profile, he will not know about the bug.
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