Missing Long Lake, Saskatchewan - resolves to Long Lake, Frontenac, Ontario instead
I'm working with some records from the 1926 Canadian Prairie Census. I've come across some records of interest from Long Lake, Saskatchewan. It's actually a census division as I see the census pages are indexed in Long Lake.
However, the actual place name doesn't resolve to Long Lake, Saskatchewan but to Long Lake, Kennebec, Frontenac, Ontario. It's obviously wrong because Ontario wasn't part of the Prairie Census. Apparently Long Lake, Saskatchewan isn't a known place in your database (even though it seems to be a census division).
This example also illustrates what seems to rather random "standardized place" matching. Why was a place in Ontario chosen when it couldn't be found in Saskatchewan? If a place is not found in the jurisdiction where it's expected to be, it would be much more appropriate to just leave it unmatched than to pick up some random place in another part of the world.
Best Answer
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You can suggest a new place for FS's database using the button at the top left of the main Places page (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20).
To report yet another autostandardization error, a link to a specific instance would be helpful -- for some inexplicable reason, the engineers still expect to be able to fix all of them piecemeal, based on individual reports.
(In the past several years, FS ran an automated process that associated places-database entities with the text fields containing locations in all of its various indexes, but apparently without any sort of data validation step, resulting in millions upon millions of index entries being identified with completely-incorrect locations, often on the wrong side of the globe.)
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Thanks for the pointer - I'll make the suggestion. I posted a comment here because I couldn't find a place to just post an addition to places, though I see now that if I just looked under the [i] icon when editing a place name, it has a pointer to their Places area.
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The problem is actually more fundamental that just a missing place name.
This place is actually a census division, and doesn't actually line up with municipality / township / county divisions very well. While you might find "Long Lake" in Saskatchewan, it's not actually a munipality or county, just a Census Division for the purposes of the 1926 Canadian Prairie Census. (There is a lake by that name, or was since it was renamed a few years back, but it's not the kind of place Family Search has in its database of Standardized Places).
It's a problem in Ontario as well, where I've noticed census divisions sometimes include several townships so will name each township in their identification. That didn't stop Family Search from assigning "Standardized Names" to them though - likely the source of many problems.
So, the practice of "standardizing" place names for census divisions is fundamentally flawed. In many cases they translate to actual places eg a municipality or township, but they are often simply made up to put a name to some geographical area to fit the needs of the particular census.
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