Ireland Census 1901 , 1911

Agnes E Schaalje

Parts of the 1901 and 1911 Census of Ireland have been incorrectly indexed. Places in County Down have been indexed as County Offaly. See M5KL-FHW Margaret Clements. I have manually changed her husband, Robert Wilson, but that is very time consuming doing it one at a time. One needs to look at Form N of the census for mote information on the place. As it stands in Family Search, one could end up going on a wild goose search for one’s ancestors in the wrong county.

Paul W

@Agnes E Schaalje

This has happened as part of FamilySearch's decision to use a computer to standardise placenames, which has resulted in countless errors of this kind - involving placenames worldwide.

If noticed by a moderator this example will be added to a very long list of errors to be fixed, although there is no timescale and it is unlikely to be corrected any time soon. So, yes, the correct placename / location can be noted, but the record cannot even be edited at present (you will notice the "EDIT" button on the record in greyed-out).

You are likely aware this (1911 census) source is currently attached (presumably wrongly) to Margaret Clements, instead of Margaret Jane Robinson. I guess you know how to correct this (by clicking on Review Attachments, then Detach and (re)attach it to the correct ID).

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This is not an indexing error, but an auto-standardization error.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q5BL-J6T2

Notice that there are two event places in the index. The one marked "(Original)" is what was actually indexed: "Hampton Park, Ormeau, Down, Ireland". The other one ("Down, County Offaly, Ireland") is what the automated process picked from the database to go with the indexed text.

FamilySearch continues to expect to fix these errors based on individual reports like this in the Community. Given that the problem affects quite literally millions of records, I don't expect to see a noticeable improvement within this decade, unless they radically change approaches.

In the meantime, you can use the correct location in Family Tree, add a note to the citations about the error, and not take anything at face value that FS's indexed records database says about "where".

Agnes E Schaalje

I’m having a little chuckle here. I am 83 years old and don’t expect to be around for another decade😋