How to have record locations corrected
A huge number of record locations for the Home District of Upper Canada have been transcribed as Algoma, an area north of Lake Superior.
Algoma District was not created/ settled until many years after settlement happened in Upper Canada.
There are hundreds of marriage records mistranscribed as happening in Algoma District when if you look at the original records the marriages happened in areas 1000 km south of Algoma, at a time when there were no settlements, no roads, no tracks north of Lake Superior.
The only way for anyone to have traveled to the Algoma area at that time would have been by canoe and It is highly unlikely that a couple from the lake Ontario area would have travelled 1000km by canoe to get married in an area that was not settled at the time of their marriage in the mid 1800s.
I have tried to edit the marriage location on multiple occasions with no success.
This is a continuing problem that needs to be fixed.
Answers
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If you post a specific example linked to one of these records under the Search section of FamilySearch Help, it will get forwarded to a team working on these problems. See, for example: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/130050/auto-standardization-error-finnas-hordaland-norway#latest or https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/130623/auto-standardization-error-fjelberg-hordaland-norway#latest
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I don't know if this is the information needed, however this record is only one of the 100s on the same set of records that are incorrectly transcribed/indexed
"Canada, Ontario District Marriage Registers, 1801-1858," database with images, <i>FamilySearch</i> (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2C1-LVS1 : 20 February 2019), Joseph Dodds, 18 Oct 1844; citing Home Township, Algoma, Canada West, British Colonial America, Archives of Ontario, Toronto; FHL microfilm 1,030,052.
The same problem exists for marriages incorrectly transcribed/indexed for marriages that took place in Wellington County, Ontario and are transcribed/indexed as taking place in the town of Wellington in Prince Edward county 300 km east. I will look for a record to use as an example.
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@Monica Ross_1, that's an auto-standardized place field. You can recognize the work of this bot by the presence of two location fields, one of them marked "(Original)" and containing the text that was actually indexed, and the other one supplied by the automated process.
FamilySearch unfortunately continues to vastly and hopelessly underestimate the scope of the problem that the automated place-standardization routine has created. They expect to fix the errors piecemeal, based on user reports, to be made in an ill-defined manner here in Community. Given that this approach will not be able to fix even a small portion of the errors within the current century, I have given up on it. I have learned to live with the fact that the location fields on FamilySearch index entries are totally and completely useless. I use other methods of locating records, such as film numbers.
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I, too, have decided reporting these auto-standardization errors is rather pointless. A FamilySearch employee acknowledged some time ago that it was known that there would be a huge number of errors created through the exercise - adding that millions of errors still seemed to be acceptable in the context of the billions that did turn out to be okay.
"Quantity over quality" seems to be the way ahead now, and one has to admit the current "bot" method must be saving on a huge amount of (human) resources, which are now available for deployment elsewhere.
Only time will tell if the resulting lack of accurate detail ultimately will illustrate any overall, positive worth of this exercise. Meanwhile, I don't think asking FamilySearch employees to spend time in correcting what amounts to a tiny fraction of these errors is a worthwhile use of resources. A "piecemeal" approach (Julia's expression) is not a serious way of dealing with the issue.
If we accept the project has been a gigantic failure, we either start again from scratch, or learn to live with the consequences. I'm more concerned about the integrity of the whole database than in reporting the examples I am encountering that might have hampered my searches for relatives. (i.e., I eventually found them, but no thanks to the way their locations / placenames are now indexed in the database.)
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Same happening in 1920 Census of places in Puerto Rico. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRFM-R5Q?i=28&cc=1488411
Discussion: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/476099
This is bad.
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I had already decided that these errors would not be fixed by FS. I know where the actual places are but researchers who are not familiar with Ontario locations, end up looking for families in the wrong places, at the wrong time and either give up, or create family histories that are fictitious.
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...exactly. researchers who are not familiar ... end up looking for families in the wrong places, ... create family histories that are fictitious.. sad..
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I just caught the 'Home District' error suggesting Algoma in Ontario's north, on a record of an ancestor. I was able to suggest a correction and explanation for that individual marriage. Do you think this corrected location will 'stick'? To correct them all, piecemeal, would be too large a project:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?f.collectionId=2569151&q.anyPlace=algoma
By 1820, the Home District in Upper Canada (Ontario) contained several counties: Ontario Co., York, Peel, Dufferin, and Simcoe. https://ontario.heritagepin.com/wp-content/uploads/map-ontario-districts-by-1820s.jpg
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The only thing that will fix this problem is work by Family Search.
I know one person who managed to get Family Search to fix the town of Simcoe and the county of Simcoe mix up, but he had to sign up as a volunteer and spend about 10 days trying to get them listed as separate places, the correction was incorrect, so he spent another week, explaining what was still wrong.
I usually make a note on the profile that the location has been mis-indexed.
I don't have that much time to spend explaining how to read a map. Or where to find historical records.
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I think I have the answer, there was a Home Township in the Algoma District. It was not established until 1858 when the Algoma & Nipissing Districts were created in Northern Ontario
The records have been listed under the wrong place!
They should be in the Home District.
The Home District was one of four districts of the Province of Quebec created in 1788 in the western reaches of the Montreal District and detached in 1791 to create the new colony of Upper Canada. It was abolished with the adoption of the county system in 1849.
Is this fixable by someone?
In 1849, the Home District was dissolved and replaced for municipal purposes by York County, which was reorganized later that year to form the United Counties of York, Ontario and Peel.
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We appreciate you bringing this problem to our attention. The issue has been submitted for investigation. We will get back to you as soon as we have an answer. Thank you so much for your kindness and patience while this is being addressed.
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Thank you!
This has been a problem for many years.
There are similar problems with marriages that actually took place in Wellington County, Ontario, that have been categorised as happening in the village of Wellington in Prince Edward County.
If I need to submit a request to have that problem addressed please let me know.
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@Monica Ross_1 We have alerted the group that is working to correct auto-standardization errors to the problem in the Canada, Ontario District Marriage records. Unfortunately, they have a large backlog of these errors, so we cannot predict how long it will take for the problem to be resolved.
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