Incorrectly indexed places in sources

EricShelton

I may have asked this once before; if so, please forgive me.

There are a number of sources for some of my family that should be indexed as "Back Creek, Roanoke [county], Virginia," but have been indexed for a variety of other "Back Creeks," such as one in Highland County, Virginia. The "edit" button on the source page is grayed out and not available. The images of these sources confirm they are for Roanoke County, and I know from other sources that this family indeed lived in the Back Creek area.

When attaching these sources, or when encountering them already attached, I have added notes explaining the error.

How can these source indexes be corrected?

Mike357

@EricShelton,

As suggested in other comments, we have been asked to report event place, standardization errors for each occurrence of the problem. I will report the two instances of this problem ,that you have found, so that our engineers will be able to review and resolve them. As there is a large backlog of these issues, it is impossible to suggest when the problems will be fixed.

We apologize that this problem continues to persist, and thank you for sharing what you have found.

You can still attach the incorrectly placed source; however, you probably would want to note the correct location (perhaps in the title, and certainly in the notes).

dontiknowyou

Reporting them here is a step toward getting them corrected.

Additional actions you can take:

1. Add to this Discussion a list of the collections in which you find these errors.
2. Examine the relevant standard place names in the Places gazetteer (link in the Site Map).
3. Systematically review and correct place names on all the profiles of the family you are working on.
4. Watch out for and correct attached historical records that don't belong, conflated persons and families, and other errors resulting from the wrong place names.

Mike357

@EricShelton, if you could provide a link to the record where you are seeing the problem, we may be able to help.

EricShelton

Examples of records that I've found with indexing errors include (remove the quotes; I couldn't get the URL to paste without them):

"https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZB6-HXK2?cid=fs_copy"

Back Creek is an area within Roanoke County, Virginia but is indexed as Back Creek, Highland, Virginia. Actually, there are several locations on the image of that page of the original record that are indexed incorrectly. Green Ridge is indexed as "Green Ridge, Morgan, Virginia, United States," Glade Creek is indexed as "Glade Creek, Nicholas, Virginia, United States," Cave Spring is indexed as "Cave Spring, Montgomery, Tennessee, United States," and others. Each of these places is an area within Roanoke County, Virginia. They might be old administrative districts of some sort within the county; they are not towns or cities. In any case, I recognize these names still in use in Roanoke today.

Another example is

"https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZTV-8FMJ?cid=fs_copy"

where the entire page's entries (referring to the image of the original record) have Bedford, Virginia, indexed as "Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, United Kingdom."

As a user, is there a way for me to correct these? If not, is there a mechanism to request corrections?

I still need to review and perform the steps suggested in the first reply to my post by @dontiknowyou

Thanks to all for your help!

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Auto-standardization strikes (out) again.

You can recognize these by the presence of two location fields, one of them labeled "(Original)". That's the text that was actually indexed. The other one is what the computer picked (apparently out of thin air) to go with that text. There is no evidence of any sort of data validation step following the bot's depradations ::ahem, sorry:: activities, resulting in Bedford, England attached to a Virginia index, and so forth and so on.

FamilySearch has chosen to stick its head thoroughly in the sand about this enormous problem: they continue to expect to fix it piecemeal, based on individual reports like this one. Given that this approach will not result in a noticeable change to the corrupted database within the current century, I have given up on it. I have learned to live with the fact that the location fields of indexed records on Family Search cannot be trusted at all. As I have written many times, the only reason they get the correct planet is that placenames on Mars are not (yet) in the database.