Birth date shows up as year only in new Source Linker

ShawnFReid

On a collection that I work on a lot (Italian Birth Registrations) and specifically for the province of Udine, many or most of the birth records display only the year, even though the full date was indexed.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G933-1VZF?view=index&action=view&personArk=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AQVSW-6B7G

In the index panel of this image, you'll see that the full birth date for Emma Chiarandini was indexed as 29 Mag 1875. (In Italian May=Maggio). Now, click the "Attach to Tree" button at the top of the panel to go to Source Linker.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/linker?ark=/ark:/61903/1:1:QVSW-6B7G&id=GJ2T-M57&hinting=/tree/person/details/

Here you can see that the record is showing just the year, 1875. Less experienced users simply proceed to add Emma to the Family Tree and she ends up with just a year for the birth date, which makes it look like it's an estimated or calculated date when in reality her full date was indexed and is available.

I've worked on this collection for years, and this problem is relatively new, possible 2 or 3 months. I don't know if it was caused by the new Source Linker, or if Source Linker is just the victim of the way these indexes were published.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I think the problem is that the date autostandardizer is very strictly monolingual: it's not recognizing the month names. They disimproved the place-standard-picking algorithm relatively recently; perhaps they've made a parallel tweak to dates, too?

(The place-standardization change makes it impossible to accidentally associate Timbuktu with Tibet — but it also makes it impossible to use a placename that doesn't happen to be among a place's alternative names in the database. Perhaps they've made the date chooser similarly literalist, without adding any non-English month names to the database?)

ShawnFReid

Thanks Julia for your insightful answer. It seemed plausible to me and I was very hopeful. Alas, in examining many records, there are those that have the abbreviated month in Italian but that do show the full date in Source Linker. Additionally, I found that the display of the year-only date is not limited to Source Linker, but in any of the various places that a record is displayed: the record page, the source tab, search results, etc. Source Linker is just a victim of some underlying data problem.

But in my wanderings, I did find a pattern that is interesting.

If I search all of Italy for births of Giuseppe Rossi (a very common name), I get results from all over Italy and they all seem to have the full birth dates listed.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&f.recordType=0&q.anyDate.from=1880&q.anyPlace=Italy&q.givenName=Giuseppe&q.isPrincipal=true&q.surname=Rossi

Then, if I restrict the search to just the province of Udine and search for anyone with the Rossi surname, the results come back with most of the birth dates being year-only. But a few, have the full birth date. And the interesting part is that those that have the year-only birth date have a location of Udine, Udine, Italy. Those that have the full birth date have a location of Udine, Udine, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italia (same location but different time-frame when regions were added).

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&f.recordType=0&q.anyPlace=Udine%2C%20Italy&q.isPrincipal=true&q.surname=Rossi

It seems to me that this has to do with how specific image groups were published. They all seem to have been indexed correctly, but there's likely some metadata that is different between these various groups / batches.

The question is: Who can look into this and fix it? Probably not the Source Linker engineers.

ScottSeegmiller

I have submitted this to the Source Linker Engineers. I will post a reply soon. But it may not be something source linker can fix.