Mislabeled record
All the Burwash, Sussex, England bishops transcripts have been mislabeled as Brighton, Sussex, England. The Burwash records were retired, and the new versions all say Brighton, but when you click on them they are correct from Burwash. See
Thomas Dunk LWZ9-8CF
If you look at his sources, the christening is linked 3 times - they are all the same record, but the old ones say Burwash (correct), but the new copy is labeled as Brighton (wrong).
This is a problem for the entire parish. When I go to the catalog for Burwash bishops registers and click on the magnifying glass and search the collection, I get tons of hits for Brighton.
An example of a mislabeled record
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68BS-D1H?i=464
Answers
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There's something funky going on with the image-to-index associations, because (for me) the provided link goes to an apparently-unindexed image, but there are clearly index entries associated with the film.
But anyway. It's a multi-part film; Items 2-3 (starting with a filming bookmark on image 269) are Burwash, which is in the catalog as Burwash, and all of the search results I looked at were indexed as "Burwash, Sussex, England" and auto-standardized to "Burwash, Sussex, England, United Kingdom" (for example https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NBRQ-BZG). So there's nothing wrong there that I can see. (Well, other than arguments about the appropriateness of "UK" at the end, but that's a whole separate topic.)
Item 1 of that film is a bit confusing at first look. It is labeled as "Brighthelmston, Sussex" at the tops of the pages, as "West Sussex, Brighton" on the starting filming bookmark (image 3), and as "St. Nicholas' Church, Brighton" in the catalog. These were apparently all indexed (probably in pre- or post-processing) as "St. Nicholas', Brighthelmston, Sussex, England", and have been autostandardized to "Brighton, Sussex, England, United Kingdom" (for example https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J8VM-8NP).
The confusion clears right up, however, once you learn that Brighthelmston is just another name for Brighton. So again, there's nothing wrong here that I can see.
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After seeing that the link in the post appeared to be unindexed, I opened the 3 sources attached to PID LWZ9-8CF. All were attached in 2019 by the same contributor.
Two of the 3 are marked as retired duplicates. The one that is recommended to use (not retired) has Brighton, both in the Event Place and the Event Place (Original), while the other 2 have Burwash.
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Oh, ugh, I see. This is not an autostandardization error, then, because the original event place is entered as Brighton on the non-retired record, although the event clearly comes from the Burwash part of the film.
I think this is the old "we can't handle multi-part films" error: the one that assigns Item 1's location to the entire film, regardless of how many different parts it has.
Original parish register (film 4427499 image 156 of 660): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DT7Q-VTP?i=155 ("This image courtesy of East Sussex Record Office").
Thomas Dunk's baptism on August 16th, 1745 was indexed twice, identically and correctly (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NDCY-78V and https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NRJF-8K3). Both of these index entries have been retired.
Bishop's transcript (film 4006399 image 465 of 936): https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68BS-D1H?i=464 ("This image courtesy of West Sussex County Council").
Thomas Dunk's baptism was indexed correctly from this image, too (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J76J-F8D), except that the pre- or post-processing step that added the location used the incorrect one, from Item 1 of the film, whereas the event is from the Item 2 section of the film.
What I don't understand is why both of the original-register versions were retired in favor of the bishop's copy. The original register's filming is of (much) higher quality, and it's the original, hence much more desirable. Both of Thomas Dunk's retired records refer to the same entry on the same film, so one of them could certainly be retired, but why both?
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi : "What I don't understand is why both of the original-register versions were retired in favor of the bishop's copy...."
😲😲😲😲
Err, I thought that retiring was only done where there were two indexes for the same original...
Original-parish-register, Bishops'-Transcripts, or Archdeacons'-Transcripts (yes, there's an occasional 3rd option) are totally different documents. They are supposed to be copies of one another but as they are hand-written, then every so often, they are different. Indeed, I've seen occasions when there are major differences between PR and BT.
So, a PR should never be retired in favour of a BT. Indeed, a BT should never be retired in favour of a PR.
I would really like this to be brought to FamilySearch's attention both to unretire one and to stop this from happening again.
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I would really like this to be brought to FamilySearch's attention both to unretire one and to stop this from happening again
I like to think we HAVE brought this to the attention of FS by tagging N Tychonievich.
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"I like to think we HAVE brought this to the attention of FS by tagging N Tychonievich."
I'd like to think so too, @Áine Ní Donnghaile, but (a) I'm not sure of his(?) role, other than that the size of it might well be heroic and (b) @Julia Szent-Györgyi 's discovery of the retirement issue (which is a process issue, not a data issue) post-dated the tagging. So - I'm crossing my fingers...
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Feel free to do any escalation you feel necessary.
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@Elizabeth Ann Monsivais et al
Thank you for the discussion and all the relevant details. I'm getting all the data you provided written up in a, hopefully, coherent way. I'll send it on to the appropriate team to see about getting places corrected as needed and to look into why records that were not duplicates were retired.
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Thank you @N Tychonievich
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OK, I have some answers. The record collection that all 3 of the sources for Thomas Dunk came from is the England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 collection. This is a legacy collection--meaning it was compiled from what was then called the record extraction program. Portions of the data from the old microfilms were extracted, and became part of the old International Genealogical Index (IG). These legacy collections had some problems. Plenty of errors made by the volunteers, which is still true of our current volunteer indexers, of course. But, in addition, sometimes data was pulled from more than one original document into one entry.
There is an ongoing effort to clean up these legacy collections so that all the data on one record details page actually comes from only one document image. Part of that effort also involves retiring records as things are cleaned up. This is what happened to Thomas Dunk's christening record. The folks working on the record collection left only 1 entry for Thomas's christening in this record collection: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J76J-F8D. If you click to see the current record for each of the 3 attached sources, you'll land at the same place.
Interestingly, the document information says that this indexed data came from Item 1 of microfilm 1468824, image 465. But Item 1 ends with image 266. So, to cut to the chase, the item was indexed as if it were from Image 1--as @Julia Szent-Györgyi observed--hence the error in place. I've sent the issue on to the folks that can get it correctly identified as coming from Item 2 and from Burwash.
Meanwhile, @Elizabeth Ann Monsivais, I'd recommend that you detach all but one of the christening sources from Thomas, since they are all ultimately going to the same URL. On the one you keep, you might want to click the Edit button there in sources and just add a note about the correct place for the christening.
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Thanks for taking this on @N Tychonievich. I now understand where at least one impetus for retiring stuff comes from.
The thing that I'd add (and you may already have this in mind) is that the end-game ought to be two index records for Thomas, each with its own image - one from a film of the (original) parish registers and the other from the Bishop's Transcripts (which are contemporary copies of the PRs). At the moment, with only one non-retired example, we've just got the BT one.
Sorry if I'm telling you things you already understand...
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Thanks @N Tychonievich; just one point where I'm not sure I agree - detaching all but one of the records from the PID may lead to duplicate profiles being created. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that jazz; contributors just love to create duplicates which we then have to merge.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile I don't believe that will happen in this case. Since those other records have been retired, they are not going to pop up as record hints in Family Tree and won't be found in a record search. It would be worthwhile to search for the original parish register and get it attached to the Tree record, however.
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"It would be worthwhile to search for the original parish register and get it attached to the Tree record, however."
Good idea @N Tychonievich
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