what do Event Place / Event Place (Original) Mean
Hi … I've been looking around the site for a page of basic definitions and didn't find one. I have two questions, please … one general and one specific.
General
Would appreciate it if someone please could tell me how to understand Event Place vs Event Place (Original) … I'm guessing either place names changed or that jurisdiction over the records changed? Or either … ? 🤷♂️
Specific
What's going on here in this Lutheran Church baptismal record from 1765?
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/LHXQ-KPH
Event Place. Wolterdingen, Wolterdingen, Kreis Soltau, Provinz Hannover, Preußen, Deutsches Reich
Event Place (Original). Wolterdingen, Wolterdingen u Worpswede, Wolterdingen u Worpswede, Hannover, Preußen
Was the man baptized in Wolterdingen or about 80 kilometers away in Worpswede?
Answers
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what do Event Place / Event Place (Original) Mean?
That is evidence that the automated placename updater has changed places to standardized formats. Unfortunately, that automated updater often doesn't get it right, moving a place to the wrong county, state, or country.
For example, see this thread, which shows Chicago, Illinois, places automagically transported to Zambia, Canada, and England.
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Your General Question:
Event Place (Original): this is the place name as originally indexed, as it is found in the original record, and is the place the event occurred.
Event Place: this is the place name as edited by the auto-standardization routine. If the originally index name was mis-transcribed, incomplete, or the least bit ambiguous, the automated routine sometimes produced wildly inaccurate results. You generally need to just completely ignore the Event Place and only use Event Place (Original). Best, of course, is to ignore both of them and go to the original record and determine for yourself the actual, correct place name.
We've been told that in a very high percentage of cases the automated routine worked just fine. But when you are working with billions of records, even a 0.1% error rate is tens of millions of incorrect place names. We have also been told that a team is slowly working through the databases correcting these errors. It is going to take them a long time to fix them all.
My favorite example of how things went awry was the marriage records for Stord parish which contained Stord, Sveio, and Valestrand sub-parishes. Apparently the auto-standardization routine ignored place type because all of the marriages ended up showing they took place in Valestrand Cemetery.
Your Specific Question:
The Event Place of Wolterdingen, Wolterdingen, Kreis Soltau, Provinz Hannover, Preußen, Deutsches Reich was what the original indexing project put as the place name and is most likely correct. So start with that and go to the original record to figure out if that name is accurate.
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We have been told (by @SerraNola iirc) that the corrections are happening collection by collection, not record by record, which makes sense given that each collection has its own metadata arrangements. So hopefully it won't take as long as it might have done.
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@BillBill4 This christening record is found on DGS Film #101891088 and we have previous reports of errors on DGS #1018991087 in which Wolterdingen and Wittlohe come up as Wersabe. You will notice on the record you referenced that it is indexed as "Wolterdingen u (and) Worpswede". The records for Worpswede begin on image 389, but some have been autochanged to Wolterdingen. This may not be fixed in the near term so I would advise in the future to always go to the image on the film. If you do not see the name of the parish, go backwards on the film until you find a title page containing the place name.
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