Whole sources of Quaker records mis-indexed
I've been correcting Quaker birth and death dates on records that I found on FamilySearch for one of my lines. Whoever indexed the source records had not been educated on how to read dates on Quaker records older than 1752. Prior to 1752, Quaker dates are based on the Julian calendar that treats the first month of the year as March. What's more, since many of the months are named after "pagan" gods, Quakers refused to use the names of months. Their dates are all written numerically as the X day of the Y month in Z year, where XY&Z are all numbers. Here's an example: "the 31st day of the 11th month of 1712/3." Intuitively, an indexer would (and did) read that month as November, but of course November has only 30 days. The second hint of a problem is the confusion over the year. The latter clears up when you realize that, because March is the 1st month, the 11th month would be January. Since this date is in January, the year is 1713 (not 1712). Their year ran from March through February, so the last two months slipped into the next year on the commonly used calendar.
That's just a sample of why the records have been indexed improperly. A page of the document may be found at https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSC7-HS2S-H?view=index&action=view
I have corrected all the indexed dates on that page. However, that document is 796 pages. Most dates probably do not predate 1752 (though all the dates on this page do). I looked around and there certainly are more pages needing correcting. It needs a dedicated person to go through it and make the corrections. I note that on your "community" page, many users are confused by this.
I suggest you make a point of educating anyone to whom you give Quaker records for indexing.
Attached is an explanation I created that may be useful to give to indexers (or it may be rewritten if you feel it can be improved upon). The first page is my summary, but the following highly technical pages of explanation are taken from a source I've cited at the bottom of my summary. I hope this is helpful.
Answers
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First: I don't know who the "you" is that you believe yourself to be addressing, but you posted in the public Community of FamilySearch. I, like most people here, am just another user of FS.
With the current version of the Community's URL-mangler, you must use the "Display as Text" setting on all links that contain colons (and some other characters), else they will not work. (Rescued link: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSC7-HS2S-H?view=index&action=view.)
But it's all moot, as the film or image group in question is FHC-only, at least with a public FS account like mine. The new viewer/editor doesn't say so, but switching to the old one (by removing the question mark and everything after it from the URL) gives the more informative error message, along with access to a citation of sorts:
"Pennsylvania, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Births and Baptisms, 1520-1999", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSC7-HS2S-H?cc=4138679 : 20 July 2023), > image 1 of 1.
Unfortunately, the only thing the Collections search coughs up with "Historical Society of Pennsylvania" is their (unindexed) card catalog (https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2524622), so I still don't know the age or provenance of the index you're speaking of.
So, sticking to generalities: FamilySearch does not revisit published indexes, except to fix broadly-applicable metadata errors or the effects of collection-wide automated processes gone awry. The dates of individual entries in an index are not metadata, and they're not the result of any automated process, so I don't believe there is currently any mechanism by which FS staff could or would make any edits to these index entries.
There are currently no indexing projects with "Quaker" in their titles, and the only Pennsylvania project is Beaver county civil marriage records, so your suggestion and instructions do not appear to be applicable right now. Unfortunately, FS doesn't publicize its plans for future indexing projects, and I am not aware of any means of getting in touch with the people who prepare such projects, but perhaps you could check the FS blog for reports about indexing, and ask the author of one of those?
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