Can someone here please fix the last name for this family on their 1910 US Census entry?
The head of the family here is supposed to be named Silas Carpenter, not Carpenter Silas: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MLFF-KXW And the rest of his family is thus supposed to have Carpenter as their last name, not Silas.
Answers
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I personally tried fixing this problem yesterday, but for some reason, my edits apparently didn't work.
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There is a known problem with the record editor. Multiple threads on the topic.
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Because of the permissions-eating gremlin, I'm highly reluctant to edit anything affecting the structure of an index, such as family groupings and "principal" status, but I did change Silas's surname to Carpenter (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MLFF-KXW).
(Your change of his given name to Silas had already "stuck".) However, I'm second-guessing myself on even this change, because the enumeration 100% says that the family name is Silas.
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I was dubious about this, too, but the 1920 census confirms the error in the formatting of the names in 1910: the surname is definitely CARPENTER, but are we supposed to change enumerators' errors?
It appears that (assuming these names were previously indexed with the SILAS surname for 1910) any changes have certainly stuck now.
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I have a census in my family, the 1900, where the enumerator made the surname Jefferson and the given name of my GGF Burgess. As a result, the entire family was listed as the Jefferson family.
I submitted a correction on Ancestry many years ago. And on FS when that option became available.
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As most of the FamilySearch records that relate to my relatives can't be corrected, I have no knowledge of how the process works - or is supposed to work. In the past, we have been told not to make changes relating to how things were recorded in the original document (whether by parish clerk, enumerator or whoever), but I guess making corrections are fine, as long as the originally indexed record is still available. In this case, the surname was clearly CARPENTER, but - as shown in the screenshot above - it would have been easy to think that the surname was ELMER (in the case of the family shown above the Carpenter family) whereas it appears it was HANNAH.
It's fine that mistakes can now be "corrected", but I am concerned that users not acquainted to the families whose records they are editing might themselves mistake a forename for a surname (i.e., the enumerator - in some cases - might have recorded things correctly, after all).
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For something like my example, Paul, I've only made changes to families I know well. I have 5 other censuses for Jefferson Burgess, showing the correct given name/surname combination, admittedly with varying degrees of spelling accuracy.
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I don't think that the enumerator erred so much here as much as simply writing Silas Carpenter's name in the wrong format. Instead of doing last name and then first name, he did the opposite: First name and then last name. I don't think that he genuinely believed that Mr. Carpenter's or his family's last name was Silas.
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Worth noting that Silas Carpenter's daughter lived to age 110 and thus became a supercentenarian: https://gerontology.fandom.com/wiki/Laura_Gibson
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@DanielGonik If the enumerator wrote the name in the wrong format, then it IS enumerator error.
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FWIW, I myself have tried fixing this yesterday, but for some reason, my edits don't appear to show on FS.org.
Here is this man's FS.org profile, for reference: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/about/K8M5-J8R
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