Fix the Event Place for England, Middlesex Parish Registers
I'm looking for information in Colonial Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut and the Middlesex Parish Registers come up in the search because the Event Place is labeled Stepney, Monroe, Fairfield, Connecticut Colony, British Colonial America.
It was very confusing because Stepney, Monroe, Fairfield, Connecticut Colony, British Colonial America is a legitimate location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepney,_Connecticut and I wondered if the records were kept in England which is why they were coming up in my search. But Stepney Parish was also in London, England, and at the beginning of the book the location is Saint Dunstan and All Saints Church, Stepney, Middlesex, England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepney_(parish)
Answers
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That's the auto-standardization bot, hard at work confusing the world by picking places effectively at random.
You can recognize its work by looking at an index detail page, such as https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6ZBL-W7TS. Notice how it has two event place fields? The one labeled with a parenthetical "Original" is what was actually indexed: "Stepney". The other one is what the automated process picked out of the global places database to go with that text. Unfortunately, there appears to have been no attempt made at validating the data generated by the bot: nobody checked that the parish register is from England, so the event places in Connecticut are completely guaranteed to be the wrong choice.
FS believes it can fix these errors piecemeal, based on user reports like yours here in the Community. (Given that it's not an exaggeration that there are millions of such errors in the indexed records database, I hope I can be forgiven my continued scepticism about this belief.)
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