How to determine location of event when not transcribed?
I have been researching my Swiss family in the canton of Vaud with the database Schweiz, Katholische und Reformiert Kirchenbücher, 1418-1996. Most of the transcribed records I have located only list Schweiz (Switzerland) as the location of the event. My ancestors lived in several neighboring villages, so there is no way to know whether these people are my relatives or people with similar names because there is no specific place. I have reviewed the original registers in the online Vaud archives and found some of the records cited. In most of the ones I’ve found, they indicate where the family lives and of course it is obvious that the events that took place in the town named on the register. Without indicating the location of the events on the record, it seems like a complete waste of time to transcribe them. Is there any way to tell from the record where it took place if the town is not mentioned? I am super frustrated at this point.
Answers
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The answer, as I think you realise, is that you need to look at the original image.
As for why the index only lists Schweiz as the place name, experience suggests to me that we'll never know for certain. What I can say is that we have had similar issues with parish records in England - we see the county in the place name, but not the specific parish.
My suggestion would be that FS have the abbreviated index and allow researchers to add the extra data from sources like the Vaud archive - it gives them a basic outline to work from, rather than require the researcher to create sources from scratch. Whether that's a good approach, I don't know, I don't have direct experience of such.
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The Vaud Archives makes all of the church and civil records available to the public for free on its website. One would think that FamilySearch would indicate in the notes if certain jurisdictions would not allow them to use their names. Several towns are identified, which makes it appear that whoever transcribed the records without specific locations did not have proper training.
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I am not connected with FamilySearch, and I am not a member of the LDS church
For records which have been indexed from FamilySearch microfilm, I believe the decision not to include place names is a FamilySearch decision.
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@Joanne Drummond said:
"… One would think that FamilySearch would indicate in the notes if certain jurisdictions would not allow them to use their names. …"
Indeed, it would be hugely helpful if they did just that.
"… Several towns are identified, which makes it appear that whoever transcribed the records without specific locations did not have proper training. …"
In fairness, we don't know that the same restrictions apply across the entire collection. The Catholic and Reformed Churches could have different policies. I can also point at Devon (England) where a small number of individual parishes have forbidden their records from going online in FindMyPast (not FamilySearch, note!) just in case the online records are used to further the aims of the LDS Church. No, I'm not exaggerating. In that instance, though, the equivalent of the Devon Record Office has at least documented what's going on, for which I am grateful.
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My theory is that the nonspecific place fields are down to the autostandardization mess: they've avoided putting Switzerland in Africa by going to the other extreme, dropping everything below the country in the standardized location.
My evidence for this theory is the existence of indexes that previously contained the complete month and day of the event and full placename data, but now have a bare year and/or just a country. However, the old data is preserved in the Family Tree, because those old indexes were the sources of the profiles that the Tree was seeded with, a dozen years ago.
Here's a random example of a disimproved event date: https://www.familysearch.org/search/linker?ark=/ark:/61903/1:1:X277-VQT&id=LZH9-NQP&hinting=/tree/person/details/.
And here's one where the index currently says "Schweiz", but per the attached profile's Change Log, it was indexed as "Wrt" at some point prior to 2012. A user came along in 2016 and decided that that meant Württemberg, Germany, but based on the Catalog's information, that's probably wrong, because the film contains the Protestant church registers from "Pratteln-Augst" (which near as I can tell means Pratteln and Kaiseraugst, which are neighboring towns on opposite sides of the Basel-Aargau canton line in northern Switzerland).
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It occurs to me that the specific question at the end of your post hasn't been answered: "Is there any way to tell from the record where it took place if the town is not mentioned?"
The answer is, you can at least narrow it down, by using the Document Information to look up the film number in the Catalog.
For example, say you found this indexed death entry for "Jeanne Pardonnet" on 18 Feb 1655 in "Schweiz". If you open the Document Information in the left-hand column, you'll see a "Digital Folder Number" of 008114864_002_M9F4-T2D. The beginning part of that gibberish, minus the padding zeros, is the film number: 8114864. Open the Catalog (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog), click on "Film/Fiche/Image…", paste the number into the resulting box, and click Search. The result shows that the film in question contains "Registres de l'eglise réformée de Pully (Vaud), 1582-1821", so you know that the person indexed as Jeanne Pardonnet died in Pully in Vaud. Some films contain multiple registers, and some registers combine multiple churches, so the Catalog's information will not always pinpoint the specific event location, but it will always narrow it down a lot further than "Schweiz".
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I have (at least partly) overcome this issue many times by checking out the film reference (usually mentioned in the citation), as Julia suggests.
I was frustrated to see "Essex, England" shown as the birthplace of many of my relatives when FamilySearch first put a collection of Essex records online: I knew that much already! However, when I looked up the film number mentioned in the Catalog, I found I could narrow the actual parish down to one of the few parishes that appeared on that particular film.
In this example, the Essex Record Office has an online, pay-to-view collection of images: which is the probable reason the specific parishes are not shown on FamilySearch - i.e., if you want to see the exact detail (from an image of the original document) you have to pay for the privilege!
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