How did Family Search come up with this ethnicity part?
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"Ethnicity part" of what, where?
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When you look at the census... below there is a side bar where Family Search has typed in the answers of the Census but they added a category called ( ethnicity). This is misleading
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@SHAWN6328 can you provide a link to the census page where you are seeing this?
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@Maile L Here's an example from the 1940 census -
https://www.familysearch.org/search/ark:/61903/1:1:K4PL-TW9
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I can find no place on the record itself where ethnicity was recorded. I guess you could always go to EDIT and remove that field. You could also send feedback on the tab found on the EDIT page.
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And, in the case of the example I shared, John Donnelly was born in Ireland, making the ethnicity incorrect.
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The important factor is how "Ethnicity" is recorded in the original document. If as illustrated, it would be wrong to change what was recorded. If not originally recorded in this manner, FamilySearch is wrong to show this in their records.
Any chance of screenshots of the originals, @SHAWN6328 and/or @Áine Ní Donnghaile ?
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@Paul W, the 1940 U.S. Census does not record "ethnicity" anywhere. The closest it gets is the "Place of Birth" column. Áine provided the link from which you can get to the image, where you can see that John Donnelly's place of birth is entered as "Irish Free State".
This means that the ethnicity field was not based on the birthplace column. Perhaps it's a relabeling of the "Color or Race" column? Except there is a "Race" field, too. I don't have enough experience with U.S. censuses to know whether there's any correlation between those two index fields.
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I put the URL in my first comment, Paul. As far as I have seen, "ethnicity" is some new bug/feature that has crept into the 1940 census extract. It is not recorded in the original.
It is not present in all extracts from the 1940. Here, for example, is my GF, and there is no "ethnicity" visible in the extract. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K4RX-VBG
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Sorry I missed the link!
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Over many years FamilySearch has introduced indexed information in at least some datasets which have never appeared in the original records.
As an example back in 2010, when a new version of the website was introduced, three datasets (baptisms, marriages and burials) relating to British India were introduced. Some, not all and probably a smallish percentage overall, of the records included a Race classification of White. Race was not a field which appeared in the original records, so the index field Race =White was a completely made up field, and in my opinion FRAUDULENT. FamilySearch to my knowledge never made any attempt to remove this made up information, and and far as I am aware it is still there, thirteen years later.
Given that individual persons doing indexing are given instructions not to index anything that is not in the record, I consider it totally against that philosophy for FamilySearch as an organisation to turn around and issue false information as part of the available Indexes.
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From the same John Donnelly record I posted above, looking at the change history is not very enlightening. The field was created in January 2022, as were all other fields. I've edited that field to blank. Time will tell if the ethnicity returns to John's record.
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Resurrecting this thread to ask for escalation. @Maile L or @Stephanie V. please.
I've been working on a family born in Alsace, France. Some records have France; some show Germany because that border changed often over the decades.
BUT - just now I looked at the family in the 1870 US Census, 2nd enumeration of Manhattan, NYC. People on that page are shown as born in France or in various parts of what is now Germany. There is no "Race" field on the original, but nearly everyone not born in the US is listed as being of the Chinese race. Link to my person of interest on the page, Apolonia Poissont née Springer: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M8XH-G97.
There is a field for Color. Chinese is supposed to be indicated by a C. There is not a single C. in that column
This would appear to be post-processing corruption. Can we please have a review of these fields that do not exist? Thank you.
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I have been busily working on some lineage this morning and just came across the most nonsensical thing I have ever seen. This is a snippet from the indexed information of a marriage record.
There is no such thing as being ethnically "American". Native American? Yes, but not [usually] when you are born in England. What is going on??
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@Maile L If I recall correctly, you were involved in the discussion we had on this issue a few weeks ago. I believe you were planning to escalate. Any news? I know such fixes more very slowly.
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My thought... Culture and birth place can be different. The social, historical culture in England are different than here in the US. If a person has moved here, made the US home, and adopted the customs, attitudes, practices of American Culture...then haven't they become a part of American culture, not English?
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@McDonaldMyra Culture is not what this is about. The field is "ethnicity" and while I cannot see the original record, I think it is NOT information that was originally on the marriage record. I suspect it is information added by FamilySearch and then populated automatically or by whoever indexed the information.
No, American culture does not equal ethnicity.
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Gail, does the document itself make any mention of the concept of ethnicity? (Or is it an index-only collection, so you can't tell?)
I'd be highly surprised if a marriage record makes any such mention. If it's a U.S. record, the closest it probably gets is race and birthplace, and if it's a European record, then it's likely to just have birthplaces. (I've never seen a European record that made any mention of the concept of race.)
I have no idea why some indexes on FS add these sorts of nonsensical, unsupported fields. Is it some sort of legacy-data problem?
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi It is the marriage of Elizabeth Ann Evans L7X5-VSL to Benjamin McCoy Smith L7X5-VS3 on 13 Nov 1884 in LaSalle Co, Illinois. If you look in the sources, there are multiple marriage records there for the same event. One of them has a restricted image associated, and I suspect it is in this collection 7700994.
Only one of the sources has ethnicity. The others do not.
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Yeah, that's Illinois for you: half a dozen indexings of I think two different documents (on films 1710811 and 1683923), and not a single image available among them.
I've done a little bit of image searching for Illinois marriage documents, and none of the examples I found made any mention of ethnicity. (Most of them don't even mention race. Or birthplaces. Or birthdates. Or parents.) So I really haven't a clue where that one indexing project got that field, and why.
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I do not know whether this is related or not. It is about nonsensical unsupported fields in FS. I have just come across a baptism record from 1918 which lists father’s sex as male and mother’s sex as female. The information is of course correct but there is no way that would have been recorded in 1918. I doubt it would be recorded anywhere today even with gender fluidity etc. Why is it there?
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That's standard addition on all baptismal, birth, marriage, death records on FamilySearch. Probably some others, but at least on all those. This happens to be one I'm working with right now, as an example.
I retrieved the image of the DC a few days ago, from my FSC, and it, of course, does not mention the gender of father/mother of the deceased.
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I seem to recall that the (rather silly) "parent's sex" fields were added around the same time that the Tree started allowing same- s e x couples, so I've always assumed that they're related phenomena.
(Edited to try to stifle the prude-bot's misapplied activities.)
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Your need to modify that 3-letter word is the reason I used "gender" instead.
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For what it's worth, traditionally and historically American ethnicity referred to WASPs, as Wikipedia explains: "In the case of the United States, the national ethnic group was Anglo-American Protestant ("American")."
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The issue here is that the field does not exist in the records. And, what is displayed is quite often not the ethnicity that might be supposed based on place of birth. "Chinese" does not apply to someone born in Alsace. "American" does not apply to someone born in Ireland.
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Also (and I suppose this is beside the point), if you were to ask someone born in Mexico but raised in the US what their ethnicity is it would not be at all unusual for the person to state "Mexican," and the same might be said of anyone born in a country that has existed for a certain duration of time, because ethnicity need not only refer to race, but to culture: ergo Mexican, Puerto Rican, Guatamalan, French, and Italian ethnicity, even though all of these countries are chock-full of various races and regional cultures, etc. Indeed it's not at all unheard of for people in the US to claim that their ethnicity is American tout court, even if they're technically of German, Polish, or whatever other descent.
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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.
mod note - two discussions were merged into this one.
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The categorization of people is Fraught and Complicated.
First of all, "race", "ethnicity", and "nationality" are all Very Different Things.
Of them, race comes closest to biological -- but that's not saying much. It basically tries to categorize people according to the continent their distant ancestors lived on, based on physical characteristics held to be common to people with such ancestry.
Ethnicity is a self-determined cultural category. You're ethnically [X] if you feel that you are part of that group. Usually, people make the identification based on shared language and customs, so what people report as their ethnicity is very frequently better labeled as "primary language" or "mother tongue".
Nationality is an administrative or political category. It's often determined by birth circumstances, such as the jurisdictions applicable to the location of birth and the status of the parents, but it can be changed, for example by adoption, naturalization, or marriage. (And citizenship is yet another different categorization, narrower or more specific than nationality.)
It is entirely possible for people who identify as the same ethnicity to have different nationalities, and for people with the same nationality to identify as different ethnicities. And both categories are entirely independent of race.
Given the self-determined nature of ethnicity, adding such a field for documents that made no record of it is especially inexplicable.
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I took a dna test showing British and Eastern European, no German. LDS shows Germany; I assume this is from way back family tree relatives from Germany. I have no info about my grandmother, maiden name Adams, so I am assuming she is that link. Since I cannot link her to Eastern European, LDS has no information to show a link to that area for me.
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