Error - Brompton by Northallerton vs Brompton by Sawdon
Put a link on the main menu so users can report any errors they find.
This is not Brompton by Northallerton it is Brompton by Sawdon, George Pickering 50/Mary Pickering 40, on HO107/1260/2/19/13, & everyone else on HO107/1260/2/20/14
Answers
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The incorrect name has been produced due to an "auto-standardization" exercise FamilySearch undertook a while back, which is causing countless thousands of perfectly correct names - shown in a record in the "Event Place (Original)" field - to be changed to a totally incorrect location. (Don't blame a human, blame the computer!)
However, this is a rather different example. The place name originally indexed ("Brompton, Yorkshire, Yorkshire North Riding, England") made no real sense in the first place, let alone allowing a researcher to lead to an understanding it referred to Brompton by Sawdon. (For those unfamiliar with the geography, the two locations are about 47 miles apart and are both situated within what is now known as "North Yorkshire".)
There is a long list of such errors currently being dealt with by a FamilySearch team. I am referring this to @N Tychonievich, who is helpfully passing such reports on to them, but there is no timescale for corrections. Even still, this case does present rather more complicated circumstances - with the "original" place name not pointing to the correct location, either.
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@Chris Fenton and @Paul W Thank you for the report of a bad place standardization in the England and Wales Census, 1841. You're going to have to help this American a bit so I can get the issue reported correctly to the group that is working on the standardization errors.
I went to the George Pickering household the census (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MQGB-TL5) and I can see that the Original Place and the Event Place do not match. I went to the image on findmypast and the only place designation I can see on the census page is Brompton 1 (part of). So, that didn't help me.
I also went to the catalog description of DGS 101721229, the source film for the image. Multiple places were included on that DGS, but the only Brompton in the catalog description of that DGS's contents is Brompton (near Scarborough).
So, folks, please help me understand how we know that this should have been standardized as Brompton by Sawdon.
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Yes, Brompton by Sawdon is aka Brompton by Scarborough! The standard place name shown in the Images section is "Brompton by Sawdon" and in the Catalog it is "England, Yorkshire, Brompton (near Sawdon)". Oh, yes, now I can see there is also a "England, Yorkshire, Brompton (near Scarborough)" in the Catalog, too.
In summary, these are all the same place - but not related to the Brompton near Northallerton, of course! I knew this one would cause problems - partly due to FamilySearch having added variants of the exact same place to its Places database (and that is regardless of time period considerations).
Perhaps @Chris Fenton can add his ideas as to which standardized place name these records should be designated. However, the accepted suffix for FamilySearch post-1801 records is (after the "Yorkshire") "England, United Kingdom".
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Wonder if you are following this, too?
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@Paul W Thank you! that gives me all I need to move this one on to the team who is working on these errors.
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@Paul W - I am now. Another headache, I fear. Just FYI these are the Vision of Britain entries for the two
https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/11791 is "BROMPTON, a township and a parish in Scarborough district ..."
https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/11792 is "BROMPTON, a chapelry in Northallerton parish ..."
I'm not sure either entry helps with deciding what the standard name ought to be - we have examples of duplicates in Cheshire where there are names to disambiguate(?) the two duplicates, but frankly, the disambiguating names appear to be informal. The Ordnance Survey Maps (for the benefit of non-Brits, nothing gets better than the OS😉 ) appear to refer to the one near Scarborough simply as Brompton, even on the 25-inch to the mile map that I checked.
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Have had holidays at both Scarborough and Northallerton, albeit the latter was a "working" one - at the North Yorkshire Record Office!
Here is an extract of the map showing the parish as Brompton-by-Sawdon, with Brompton to the south, Sawdon to the north and Scarborough to the north east:
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The Kingdom of Hungary did a Great Placename Disambiguation Project in the late 1890s. Usually, one of the same-named places got to keep the name unchanged, while the others added a prefix naming the county or the local river or similar. This means that if you're willing to deal with a bit of anachronism, you can uniquely identify every community in the kingdom with just three levels: place, county, country.
Has England never done anything similar?
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It doesn't appear so, because confusion still remains where extended names (e.g. Seamer in Cleveland) are used, but are not official ones. Hence the problem even within one county - e.g. in Yorkshire, which has two places identically named Seamer (53mls apart), ditto Normanby (30mls apart) and Brompton (see Adrian's links - 47mls apart). Unofficial suffixes are just used to differentiate between the pairs.
Maybe we shouldn't be too harsh about the results produced by the auto-standardization exercise. (Only that it was run in the first instance!)
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Warwickshire's got a similar, although much less knotty problem: two places called Leamington.
At least in that case there's a clear main one in the present day: Leamington Spa is a town of 50,000 people and Leamington Hastings is a village of 466!
However go back 250 years and things get more awkward. Leamington Hastings was still a small village, but so was Leamington Priors. Thing is that Leamington Priors then is Royal Leamington Spa now. The Priors and Hastings suffixes were all to do with who was lord of the manor: the Hastings family or the priors of Stoneleigh Abbey.
The problem with Leamington Spa is the number of synonyms: Leamington, Leamington Spa, Royal Leamington Spa and Leamington Priors! What I do know is that Leamington Priors is never used as a name for the town now and that the royal charter for it was granted in 1838.
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mod note -The discussion title was edited to keep the discussion on the topic of the placenames issue originally posted.
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