How do I alert others that the 1941 New Zealand electoral roll index has incorrect indexing?

ElizabethHickey

There are errors in the indexing of the New Zealand 1941 electoral roll records. I have had a genealogy researcher search the actual electoral roll for me. How can we get the index corrected? How can we alert other researchers that there are errors in the index?

Here are some examples:

The following individuals are shown in the 1941 index as being at Palmerston, Otago: Frederick Ernest Howard GRIGG, Doris Laura GRIGG and Ross Frederick GRIGG in fact resident at 15 Renfrew Ave, Mt Roskill, Auckland; Raymond Edgar FARRANT and Ethel May FARRANT in fact resident at 5 Mt Roskill Road, Mt Roskill, Auckland.

The following individuals are shown in the 1941 index as being at Waipawa, Wairarapa: Frederick CASH and Ethel May CASH in fact resident at 29 Ewen Street, Takapuna, Auckland; James Walter BROWN and Laura Mary BROWN in fact resident at 27 Ewen Street, Takapuna, Auckland.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

We often find that such incorrect places were not entered by the indexer(s) but occurred in post-processing usually caused by the faulty place standardization algorithm.

ElizabethHickey

OK but the end result is incorrect information viewable by a family researcher using only the indexed information. Can we alert people that they cannot rely on this information?

Áine Ní Donnghaile

I've spent a great deal of my research time trying to do just that over the last couple of years. I'm not convinced that I was successful in conveying the need to fix the problem. You'll see in this thread that we no longer have a mechanism to report the issue.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The unfortunate long-term consequence of FamilySearch's autostandardization endeavor is that we cannot trust what any index entry on FS says about "where". We can use the location search fields and filters as first approximations only: they generally at least point to the correct country. (Not always, but usually.)

All of the genealogy sites have such data problems. For example, if a person is female, you cannot trust what Ancestry and MyHeritage say about her surname. (Yes, fully half of some collections are just flat-out wrong on those sites.) FamilySearch only has occasional collections affected by such overgeneralization of English practice to the rest of the world, but the localization errors affect every collection, casting doubt even on the entries that do happen to be correct.

However, as unfortunate a decision as FS's autostandardization was/is, it's a long-term annoyance rather than a fatal flaw. This is because it is sound advice for all research, including genealogy, that indexes should always be taken with a grain of salt, no matter where they're found: whenever possible, use them only as pointers for where to look further, and try to track down the document that the index is based on.

ElizabethHickey

thanks Aine and Julia. Looks like I just hit an issue you are all familiar with. And yes, I always review original records where these are available. There are often hidden gems.
By the way, here’s my best example of geographic misplacement: I chanced on an electoral record for someone (not a member of my family) living in Remuera, a suburb of New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, where the index database gave the location as Myanmar. Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is about 15 hours flying time from New Zealand.

Thanks again for your comments .