Will this issue be fixed?
While indexing, I am finding that Irish Parish registers are stated to be from one County but in actual fact are from a different County.
I have encountered this numerous times. For example, I indexed two batches today. Both were purportedly in County Donegal. However, one was County Offaly (Kings County) and the other was County Galway.
I wonder if these discrepancies are corrected on the back end or is the whole database going to reflect the errors.
Thank you
Eithne Mulhall
Answers
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We appreciate you bringing this problem to our attention. 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.
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This has happened with recently indexed collections for Northumberland (which include a vast amount of County Durham records) and Lancashire (which, I believe, include records of Cumberland parishes).
Whilst the former project was still ongoing I pointed out the errors being made, but was told no action would be taken to address the issue.
All these examples are very worrying in that they are not just relating to post-indexing issues, but known / reported errors that are occurring whilst a project is still active, but are being treated as unimportant.
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@Eithne Mulhall and @Paul W I have been asked to get a bit more information for our product managers to see exactly what you are experiencing. They think that they know but want to be sure. Could you please give me indexing batch specifics so they can look at exactly what you are seeing? Thanks so much!
-Stephanie
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Thank you for giving your attention to this, as well as a matter I raised in another post.
The Northumberland collection is found at https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2353070. It contains many records that are for events that took place in the county of Durham. For example, see the sources of Ann Fenwick LMWT-91S. The first source in the list (if you are seeing them in the same order as me) is the accurate one - showing a 4 November 1752 Sunderland, Durham baptism - which I have confirmed through viewing the original parish register entry. However, the other "1752" sources (why there should be four, identical ones is a mystery) all show the same date, but an event place of "Northumberland, England".
I believe this type of error occurs when records are held at a repository outside of the county where the event took place. This certainly appears to be the case here - the records being found at the Northumberland records centre at Woodhorn, but thousands of the events relating to events that took place in neighbouring County Durham.
The practice of indexing records to the county in which they are held, rather than where the event occurred causes confusion and is totally incorrect practice, of course. This particular collection has been handled very badly (both at indexing and post-indexing stages), resulting in multiple records being created from one indexed record: the common date of 22 April 2021 shows this to be the case.
The multiple-source issue has occurred with Yorkshire collections, too, so there appears to be the need for an investigation of how these errors (or indexing to the wrong locations) and also how multiple sources are being fed down to us, instead of just the one.
The indexing to wrong county issue always appears to happen due to the circumstances described: records for events that took place in Cumberland but were held in a Lancashire record office also created a similar problem.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you should require further clarification on this, or related indexing practices that are currently causing problems for Family Tree users and in our general research.
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@Paul W Thanks for the info. I will pass this along!
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