Family is split on two pages in US 1870 Census
My Family is split on two pages in the 1870 census- Husband, wife, and first child on one page (pg 4, Image 513) and the rest of the family on the next page (pg 5, image 514). They were originally incorrectly indexed separately, and need to be combined into one family record. How can this be fixed? I tried, but it's not letting me correct it.
"United States Census, 1870", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MZLP-5YR : Wed Oct 16 00:22:54 UTC 2024), Entry for John Bristol and Harriett Bristol, 1870.
"United States Census, 1870", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MZLP-5YB : Wed Oct 16 00:23:53 UTC 2024), Entry for Lydia Bristol and Sophrona Bristol, 1870.
Answers
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Index correction is (still) very buggy, and "structural" corrections — such as combining a family across images — are especially likely to attract the permissions-eating gremlin, which renders entries invisible instead of corrected. (Another variant on the index editor's gremlins, unique to censuses, is the one that turns every family member into a duplicate of the head of household.)
I suggest you use the index as is, noting the image number for the rest of the family in the Notes sections of the attached sources. Alternately, or in addition, you can attach the images directly as sources. You can do this last more than one way; I will explain the newest one, using the index-editor-and-viewer.
Starting from the index pages that you linked, you can get to the editor-and-viewer three ways: click Edit in the middle of the top black bar; or click the (largish) thumbnail in the left-hand column; or click the "View Original Document" button below the thumbnail. You will end up with a view of the page image in the left-hand portion and an index panel on the right, showing the entry for the person whose index detail page you started from.
At the top of that right-hand panel, click the back arrow (circled in orange above) to switch the contents of that panel to the index list for the entire image. Once you're on this more "generic" view, click the Attach To Tree button at the top right of the image area.
It looks like the same button was also there previously, but it's actually a different button then: that one invokes Source Linker. The button on the "generic" view (marked with an orange arrow above) invokes a specialized version of the "Add Source" dialog, arranged in a way that's (much) better suited to creating a source with a transcription. (Instead of obscuring everything with a popup, it puts the fields in the right-hand pane, which stays put when you pan and zoom, and even if you page forward and back.)
Just like in the regular source-creation process, the only required field is the title. Since this source will be attached to multiple family members, the title should describe the record in a way that applies to the whole family, such as "John Bristol and family, 1870 U.S. Census, Bradford county, PA". I do strongly suggest making use of the date and notes fields, even though they're optional.
Step 2 of the process gets a bit confused: it tries to bring up a single "attached in Tree to" profile, same as it would for an individual index entry, but of course it fails. Just ignore the red box and its nonsense advice. If the head of household's Tree profile isn't in your Recents list, get his ID in a different tab, paste it into the box, and click the magnifying glass.
It's a little bit dumb: even though there's only one choice, you still need to click the radio button.
Step 3 is the best part: this is where you can attach this same exact source to every single family member that it applies to. (Well, immediate family — parents, siblings, spouses, and children of the person you chose in step 2. If it's a marriage record, you'll want to make sure you checked the "Add to Source Box" option back in step 1, because otherwise you'll miss one set of parents-in-law.)
Step 4 is just a "reason" box; I personally never use this one, since the source speaks for itself for anything that could go here.
As I've implied above, the source created this way is a "linked set" of instances, not a bunch of separate sources for each individual. This has the (in my opinion, very slight) disadvantage that you can't "personalize" it (except by editing the attachment reason on the individual profile's Sources list), but the corresponding (and in my opinion, very important) advantage that you only need to make corrections (of typos etc.) once, and you can make those corrections on any of the instances of that source. If you've attached the image to all 13 family members, and then notice while tagging things on Alice's profile that you typed "Penne" where you meant "Penna", you can fix it right there on Alice's profile, and it'll be corrected on John's, and Harriet's, and Lydia's, and so forth and so on.
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Ack, I meant "top right of the image area". (I know my left from my right quite well, thankyou. Getting the correct word is a different matter entirely.)
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi Thank you for these very clear step by step instructions for attaching sources in the new image viewer. I will be sending others to this thread!
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@SerraNola, you're a mod, that means you can edit my post …? Any chance you could fix my error and change "left" to "right" in the second sentence between the first two screenshots ("click the Attach To Tree button at the top
leftright of the image area")?2 -
@Julia Szent-Györgyi Done
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@JenniferBristol This problem occurs quite frequently in the various censuses. When I've encountered it, as a help to others, I've put notes in the reason field and included a hyperlink to the record for the other half of the family, Sometimes, when the record is especially messed-up, I've transcribed it as text and added that too.
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