Can someone re-index this record please.
Bad Indexing!! It should be corrected or rather investigate the whole batch for this kind of work.
"South Africa, Dutch Reformed Church Registers (Cape Town Archives), 1660-1970 ," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSV8-WVCQ?cc=1478678 : 12 April 2023), > image 1 of 1; State Archives, Cape Province.
Parish registers, Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, Cape Province, 1845-1899
film # Film # 008120993 page 1098
Baptisms 1892-1892 Caledon through Wynberg. -- Baptisms 1893-1895 Aberdeen through Alilwal Noord
Thank you
Hester
Answers
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If I understand the problem, this seems to be more of a computer issue than indexing as some pages seem fine. We will look into ways that we can report this issue.
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CraigWArmstrong Thank you for your reply. I am not so worried about the un-neat state of the page, but the indexing itself. Even the country is wrong.
Look at this:
I suspect the whole book might be indexed like this.
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The same one
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Well, at least the part where "even the country is wrong" is not the indexer's doing: that's the autostandardization bot, picking a place effectively at random. (Granted, "Fera" -- the actually-indexed birthplace -- appears to be a random sequence of letters, same as the names.)
The other images I looked at were indexed correctly, so no, this sabotage does not apply to the whole book.
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There is a place called Fera, somewhere in the Solomon Islands, but this has nothing to do with this record. This is a South African batch with Afrikaans language writing. The names and date was typed in by someone I'm sure, where does the date April 1978 come from then? Surely not a random date, what prompted the auto standard bot to generate this number then. The dates on the South African record is 1892. How does this record get past all the indexers and validators?
Anyway I hope this record can be re-indexed.
Hester
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No, the record's not gonna get re-indexed any time soon. FS doesn't send stuff back once it's published, not even for widespread errors. One image's worth of gibberish is unfortunately not worth their time or effort.
Yes, I know the places database has a place named Fera in the Solomon Islands. But as you said, that's not relevant: those characters did not come from that image. They came from the indexer's keyboard, at random. The autostandardization bot's attachment of the Solomon Islands is a different thing, much later in the process, and it's not actually meant to be random: it's supposed to take what was indexed and associate it with the correct place on the map. Unfortunately, even when fed non-gibberish input, it gets it wrong more often than not, hence my comment about "effectively random".
(If I want to be charitable, I can guess that the indexer was frustrated by the system and filled in the fields with gibberish out of desperation to just get the batch off of his screen. I'm sure he didn't expect it to survive the review process, and I don't know how it did.)
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Thank you for your reply. You make perfectly sense, and yes it comes from the indexer's keyboard.
If management can trace the indexer, they should be able to teach him/her how to return a batch without spoiling the record/s. Another thing, I think South Africans should index these records, because they know exactly and understand these records and how or why it is written that way. They are familiar with all the places in South Africa.
Thousands of records are lost and then I wonder if it is worth the effort of doing voluntary work if this is going on. The true and good volunteers have worked for many years and give up their most valuable time to help their and other country's records go into the database for their families to see. I don't blame anyone, but I see what I see and it looks like no one is proud of their work anymore.
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We have reported this issue to the group than can get it corrected. We do not have a time estimate for when it will be fixed.
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Thank you so much, Hallelujah! I appreciate that you understand my point and are able to fix it.
Best regards
Hester
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