Systematic surname error in Switzerland, Catholic and Reformed Church Records, 1418-1996
The collection Switzerland, Catholic and Reformed Church Records, 1418-1996, made available this year, contains 37,054 records. Of those, 7,466 are baptismal records. Apparently, these records give the surnames of infant and mother, leaving the father's surname blank.
In some cases the father's surname is indexed the same as the infant, but in many cases the father is incorrectly assigned the mother's surname. So we have an infant named Emanuel Bischoffberger with parents Friedrich Schweizer and Babetta Schweizer. The father's name should be Friedrich Bischoffberger.
Was there a deficiency in instructions to indexers? Was there inadequate review? Can this systematic error be corrected by engineers?
Answers
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Someone posted somewhere around here about this recently, but of course I can't find it.
The images are not available to me, but apparently, the format of the records is something along the lines of "Emanuel Bischoffberger, son of Friedrich and Babetta Schweizer". It's taken for granted in this phrasing that one knows that child and father have the same surname, so there's often not even a ditto mark or tilde marking the omitted name.
However, the phrasing "Friedrich and Babetta Schweizer" generally has a very different interpretation in English: the surname after the wife's name is assumed to be her husband's. I remember that this used to be in the General Indexing Guidelines as one of the contexts in which one was supposed to apply one person's name to another. I remember this so distinctly because it's exactly backwards for every context where I've encountered it -- such as German (or German-style) records like these Swiss registers.
There are no General Indexing Guidelines any more, but parts of them are quoted in the project-specific instructions on many projects. The bit about "John and Mary Smith" being indexed as "John Smith" and "Mary Smith" doesn't show up in the projects I work on, but this doesn't mean that it hasn't been preserved and followed in other projects.
However, given the completely-consistent error, I don't think this can be blamed on indexers. They were likely following instructions and leaving the father's surname blank. It was probably a post-processing step that followed the English model and filled in the mother's surname as the father's.
But the error seems too consistent even for that scenario: human indexers would inevitably have filled in the father's surname (correctly) at least part of the time, instructions be darned.
The prevailing theory on Hungarian genealogy lists and forums is that the recently-published indexes on FS were largely or even entirely computer-generated. This idea is primarily based on the fact that nobody recalls seeing these registers in any indexing project on FS any time in the past decade at least, and certainly not this year or last. There are way too many records in the index for it to have been a quick project that most people missed.
If these new Swiss indexes were also computer-generated (or at least computer-aided), and the AI was "taught" using the English model that led to those old Guidelines, then it would've consistently misinterpreted the phrasing of the registers, and we'd have exactly the situation we see.
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Someone posted somewhere around here about this recently, but of course I can't find it.
Same.
I too suspect robot indexing. This gives me hope that the batch can be re-run with the surname parsing corrected.
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Well, I just finished several days of work to attach hundreds of records to the correct persons in the correct families despite the wrong surnames. The Research Help hints system is being thrown for a loop.
I know the families well, having worked with their pedigrees for many years; most profiles already have numerous historical records attached. So I am confident that I am making correct attachments. But what about any contributor who is not so familiar? They are likely to be very confused. They may even dispute my attachment of those sources due to the surname mis-match.
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@dontiknowyou Looking at the page of search results you shared the link for: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&f.recordType=0&q.filmNumber=8042917&f.collectionId=4138674, the inaccurate surname for fathers does not seem to be systematic. Plenty of the items on that list of results showed an appropriate surname for the father, based on the surname showing for the child. So, this seems to be errors caused during indexing. But the names are all editable, so it would be wise to fix the inaccurate surnames when you find errors for your own family.
For good or ill, the plan is for more and more of our indexing to be computer-generated. And, the plan is for those computer-generated indexes to allow all fields to be edited. That will put the responsibility on the user to make the corrections. Granted, this can make it harder to be confident in search results for indexed records. But, of course, there is no perfect system.
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Many surnames are correct, but many are not.
Edit is not available to me on this collection.
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