Index correction caused a mess in the 1850 U.S. census
I use the index correction feature nearly daily nowadays (because of whatever process it is that's adding the man's surname to the woman's in Hungarian civil registration indexes), so when someone posted about "Stalker" being indexed as "Slattery", I went and looked and agreed, and made the correction.
Ooops.
The search results look fine,
but trying to open the detail page for any of John's family members now goes to a page showing John's details.
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M441-6DZ
Ditto for https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M441-6DD, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M441-6DC, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M441-6D8, and https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M441-6DH, except the "Attached in Family Tree to" person is different each time. The profiles' Sources tabs all have the "We are unable to display the record for this source. Please try again later" error message under Indexed Information.
All I did was change "Slattery" to "Stalker" on John's index entry. Really. The process made no mention anywhere of the rest of his family; I didn't so much as touch them until afterwards. My correction should not have caused this mess!
Do we need to warn people not to use the index correction feature on the 1850 U.S. Census?
Answers
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I will pass this on to be researched. Thanks Julia!
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Seven months later, this has not been fixed. All of the family members' index details still say John Stalker.
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I've also ran into something like this, where just correcting a surname resulted in the entire record becoming corrupted and refusing to display. I don't remember which census it was, though. I just stopped risking making any corrections.
I checked the records @Julia Szent-Györgyi posted and saw the same thing she described. I tried deleting and restoring the index for John, thinking it might reset it to its original state. Instead it deleted his entire Record Group; after that, when I tried to view his or any of his family's 1850 census records, I got the error screen saying "Something Went Wrong: Unfortunately, something went wrong and we are unable to display the record. Try refreshing the page, or come back later."
I had to create a new Record Group and add him to it (and that process was buggy too -- I couldn't drag him from unattached to the "Add new Record Group" area, I had to drop him in an existing Record Group first, then drag him up to that field. After that, the records became functional again, but his name didn't show up in the new Index list, but did in the old index list.
Then I tried to create a new index for his wife using the Add Person button in the new index, just to see if the corrupted records to could be recreated manually. I entered the names, age, sex, highlighted the appropriate places, created a Record Group for her since John's wasn't available. And when I tried to view her new record, the one I just created, I got an error saying "We're unable to show this record to you. This record can only be displayed on certain accounts. FamilySearch must honor the agreements we have with our partners, record owners, and internal policies."
Wha...? That error... I'm not allowed to see the record I created, on a census page I can see. Makes sense. Oh, and her new record doesn't appear on either the new or old index page.
So, yeah. There's a lot of buggy functionality on this site, but I honestly haven't seen anything quite as horrific as this. (Apologies to the QA team if you caught these bugs and the project leads decided not to fix them -- I've been there).
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@RTorchia, I reported the bug where editing the index renders the record restricted (the "we can't" error) back in July (https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/148052/new-index-editing-tool-problems-with-adding-entries#latest), but it's still ongoing: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/154143/search-results-contain-records-i-cant-access-after-tweaking-indexed-data#latest.
"Horrific" is a good word for it.
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Less than a week shy of a full year later, this has still not been fixed. The entire family is still identified as John Stalker on their index detail pages.
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