Database error not indexers! Minnesota burials location in other country?
"Minnesota, Veterans Grave Registration Reports, 1930-1975", Database
Having participated in this indexing project, and seeing complaints from others about places not having a country, or even a state in the location indexed showing up later in a totally different location, I came across a relative's burial record where that happened.
I thought at first he might have died fighting overseas since the burial was in England, but checked his obituary (findagrave entry), and he died at home in Winona, Minnesota, and was buried in the family cemetery:
St Mary's, Winona, Winona, Minnesota
The burial information on the sample form (not the actual which is not available, so can't be edited) shows Place of burial blanks for (city) and (county) for location, plus one for the Name of cemetery that might have been indexed, but the state "Minnesota" would not have been (nor was there a entry box for country).
Event Place (Original): St Mary's
Cemetery: St Marys
However, what ended up on the FamilySearch record is:
Event Place: St Mary's, Iles of Scilly, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom
How that happened is the real question for a collection where the burials are supposedly all in MINNESOTA?
There are many more records like this for other veterans buried in St Mary's Cemetery, Winona, Minnesota, also showing them buried in St. Mary's Cornwall, England. Who knows what other errors in location there are in this database if the location is being chosen using only the cemetery name and matching it randomly to a location that has a cemetery with that same name.
Answers
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That's the autostandardization bot, hard at work picking places effectively at random.
Unfortunately, FamilySearch apparently continues to believe that the incredibly-widespread data corruption caused by this automated process can reasonably be fixed piecemeal, based on individual user reports like yours.
You can recognize the bot's "contributions" by the existence of two location fields. The one labeled with a parenthetical "Original" is what was actually indexed, in this case just the cemetery's name; the other one is what the computer picked out of the global database of placenames to go with that indexed text. Unfortunately, there appears to have been no data validation whatsoever applied to its choices: the algorithm did not take into consideration that the index was of Minnesota graves.
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@N Tychonievich please and thank you.
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@MinnWisRoots Thank you for the report of the place standardization error. My apologies that I didn't get to this one sooner. I have now reported it to the group that is working to correct these issues.
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Thanks for reporting it. I know that things got backed up because of RootsTech. One of my volunteer group projects has been on hold as well.
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