Mistranscriptions
I have come across several entries relating to my grandmother, Lucy Maria James, born Bishops Castle, Shropshire, England 19 May 1876, (baptised there 11 June 1876), together with her siblings, Edith Harriet (baptised there 17 Nov 1878), Frances Louise (baptised. there 15 Mar 1874), Laura Jane (baptised there 5 June 1881), Percy Richard (baptised there 27 Apr 1884), Sydney Jeremiah (baptised there 21 Oct 1888). Your transcriber has shown these events to have taken place at Berrington, Shropshire, a village over 20 miles away with which the family had no connection. It would appear to me to be the acceptance of predictive text
Answers
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@PeterEverall2 If you can share the URL/link to one or more of those records, we may be able to answer your question and possibly get the error, eventually, corrected.
There is an issue with placename standardization that displays some records in an incorrect location.
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Thank you for your reply. Can you please advise what a URL/link is and where to find it and I will respond further. I am hoping to go to Shropshire Archives tomorrow and check the Berrington registers to ensure that by some pure chance there isn't another family with the same names there. I think it unlikely.
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The URL will be found in the browser address bar when you are viewing the record or index. For example -
This is the URL of a record of the death of Henry Gillen: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QJXM-2F9K You can see where it is located in this screenshot (highlighted in blue). You just copy and paste it, using your mouse, to show it to us.
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These are the entries which I deem to be for the incorrect location. In some cases there are duplicate entries for the correct locations. There are others which I am suspicious about. It is only because I live in the county and have visited the locations on several occasions that I dispute some of the information given. Had I been a stranger I might well have accepted the locations at face value.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YPT-T33Z : 4 August 2022), Lucy Maria James, 1876.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YPM-46MM : 4 August 2022), Laura Jane James, 1881.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YG9-SRMM : 4 August 2022), Sydney Jeremiah James, 1888.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YGY-YV6Z : 4 August 2022), Edith Harriet James, 1878.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YP7-H1ZM : 4 August 2022), Percy Richard James, 1884.
"England, Shropshire Parish Registers, 1538-1918", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7YGR-SWW2 : 4 August 2022), Frances Louisa James, 1874.
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This is a new one for me: I noticed that there's a little down-arrow next to the event place, as if it has been edited -- twelve times?!.
However, the images are not (or no longer) available (or not to non-LDS like me, anyway), so the "Edit" button is greyed out. This means that those extra entries cannot be the result of user edits.
I'm not sure what's going on with the index's display, but I think it goes back to the relevant microfilm: it was a multi-item film containing parish registers from ten different places in Shropshire (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&query=%2Bfilm_number%3A1657518).
What it looks like to me is that instead of figuring out which item a particular image (and the associated index entries) went with, they just added all of the possibilities to the Event Place field, in random order. Unfortunately, that random order put Berrington first, not Bishops Castle, so the wrong location is displayed.
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Thank you for that explanation which sounds plausible. It would follow from what you say that there may be dozens of entries relating to other families where the event is mistakenly taken as Berrington (not Barrington) instead of the true place. The parishes which you list are scattered all over Shropshire and this "error" could well lead researchers to completely the wrong places in search of their ancestors.
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Hopefully, users of this index will know never to take an index as fact.
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@PeterEverall2 The six records you provided links for in your 12 January post now have the location listed as Bishop's Castle, Shropshire.
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