Two long-standing queries/problems still pending
WHY?
According to his 1909 Chicago Death Certificate, Frank Barta LT6K-2G2 was born in Bohemia, as were both his parents.
Why then does the extract try to add "American" as his ethnicity in the Source Linker?
And, in another long-open and unresolved issue, Frank and his wife Annie Skala married once. Their marriage record has been indexed twice; one version is more complete than the other. The more complete version (with the full date of the marriage) is marked as a retired duplicate, and the one with only the year of the marriage is marked current and therefore preferred.
Indexed vaguely as 1883: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N76F-JXM
Indexed with the full date of 13 October 1883 and retired: https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V2LT-PZY
One Marriage License:
Answers
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I find the ethnicity one disturbing. We are told - perfectly correctly - that only stuff on the record should be indexed. But there is no "ethnicity" item on the death certificate that I can see. There is a "Color" item but that's not the same thing at all - indeed Color has come through to Source Linker under "Race", so it must be a different item.
I've just checked and in my very small selection of US death certificates, I have "Color" and "Color or Race". I've not found "Ethnicity" yet. Which clearly doesn't say anything about other DCs for certain.
Personally, I'd just ignore the thing in Source Linker but it's pretty certain that many researchers will just carry the value over onto the profile, which means that if anyone else tries to search for that profile using something else as an ethnicity, they might not find it, depending on how tight their search parameters are.
I'm not sure what the fix should be - ignore the item in Source Linker???? (That's just thinking out loud…)
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I find the ethnicity one particularly disturbing. In the ones I've noticed, it is almost always wrong. I've found Irish-born ancestors listed with American ethnicity, when there is nothing on the record that could be so interpreted. Dying in a location does not attach that ethnicity to a person.
I do ignore the incorrect ethnicity (and lots of other strange fields) in the source linker. But, what you and I do, as experienced researchers, is not likely to be the norm.
Another piece of the problem with the duplicate retired records - in some cases, it appears that all existing indexes of the record(s) are now marked retired and cannot be found in a search. For my Chicago research, I've had to find the certificate numbers and DGS numbers on two different index sets on one of the for-pay websites and then manually browse to find the relevant certificate. That's manageable when the certificates are in certificate/numerical order, but they were not always filmed that way.
When I find the records, through the back door, I almost always find an existing index attached.1 -
I wonder if the retirement of all existing indexes is due to their presence on pay sites elsewhere? Though it's odd if they've been around for some time and have only just been retired…
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The Chicago records are not on any pay sites.
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Oh!
Bang goes my theory…
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@Adrian Bruce1 Appreciate the input. I would truly like resolution. Retiring something that is NOT the same is troubling. And, records that are here but cannot be found is annoying.
Just to double check - you CAN see the images I posted above? A friend told me that he could not see the images, only placeholders.
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Áine - assuming that you mean the images in this thread, yes I can see them, loud and clear.
Once or twice, a few weeks ago(?) I could only see placeholders in one of your posts - I just assumed things (no idea what things!) were slow and thought no more of it.
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Thanks for confirming. Yes, I meant the images in this thread.
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