Why is every principal in this new index marked either "male" or "unknown"?
In the middle of July, a new index of Hungarian church registers showed up out of the blue on FamilySearch. It is ... not without errors, but it turned nearly my entire fan chart blue overnight a few weeks ago, so the hinting algorithms seem to be able to compensate pretty well for the mistakes.
I've worked my way through about half my fan chart, and in all of the new hints, the thing I have noticed is that the sex of the principal of every event is marked either male/M or unknown.
Here's an example of a clearly-female death marked "male": https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6N3W-QSTQ
And here's an example of a bride with sex marked as "unknown": https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6N3Z-NWTN
In both of these cases, and in nearly all of the other ones I've looked at over the past two weeks, the correct sex was clearly written in the register: Eszter is stated to be her parents' daughter, and Krisztina's name is written in the "bride" column, which is completely separate from the "groom" column.
Principals who are actually male are generally marked "M" in this index: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6N3W-MPHS
So it seems to me that whatever the source, this is not at heart an indexing error, but some sort of processing error: for whatever reason, F for férfi "male/man" or fiú "boy" was correctly turned into M for male, but N for nő "female/woman" or L for leány "girl" for some reason was turned into "Male". And I haven't a clue about the origins of all the nonsensical Unknowns.
Is there any hope of these errors getting corrected?
(And does anyone have any idea where this index came from? Was it done by machine, as many have surmised, given its complete absence from FS's indexing projects?)
Answers
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It occurs to me that maybe what happened was that a processing step was applied one too many times: first F became M and N/L became F, and then they did it again, leaving M as M but turning F into Male.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi Sorry that your question about the Hungary Church Books 1624-1950 got lost in the shuffle and never answered. Unfortunately, we are not seeing any indications on record collections that were computer-indexed. I'm hoping that they will begin labeling them. Thank you for the examples. I can ask whether this is something that engineering can/is willing to take a look at. I don't always actually hear back from them when I send in a request. If I do get a response, I'll post here to let you know. And, thank you for providing specific examples I can show them.
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