Location Algorithm Getting Worse - All Canadian Census Records
Answers
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@SerraNola has taken the lead in compiling these details and escalating to the team responsible. With the holiday weekend in the USA, it may be Monday before you have a reply.
As I recall, the Canadian census issue has been reported.0 -
No consolation to you but we (as in those of us who have seen sad numbers of these) are pretty certain that, contrary to what is implied elsewhere, the list of places revealed by the arrow-head is not a list of changes to that value. In other words, "Clinton, Huron, Ontario, Canada" is not the original information - it's just one of the values that appear - and one that wasn't chosen.
I have seen no plausible explanation of what the order means - if anything - or why there are multiple placenames there at all.
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And just to add evidence (if it is needed), my go-to family in the 1881 Canadian census exhibits exactly the same issue. The source record is on https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MVDV-7V5 and shows an Event Place Original of "3, Middlesex West, Ontario", with Sub-District "Caradoc". Thus:
As can be seen (I hope) "Caradoc, Middlesex, Ontario, Canada" (which is the value I have chosen on my home PC) appears in the list as the bottom value. The version actually chosen is just the county "Middlesex, Ontario, Canada". What pattern matching is going on, I can't imagine but it's discarded what I think is the more precise value.
What's even weirder is that if I use the image viewer for Timothy's 1881 census record, it also has a place, and it reads "Place: Caradoc Township, Middlesex, Ontario, Canada". In other words, it's different again from both of those in the screenshot image (the word "Township" appears only on this version) and is actually as accurate as I could hope for! But what it's used for, I don't know.
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I have worked on Huron County families in FS since around 2018, it used to come up Clinton, Huron, Ontario. And in past 2-3 years pretty much useless. As location is one of the most vital search tools it is very unfortunate. Also on another concern re 1901 census I was told that I should be submitting every error I find. I question I guess whether or not FS has an understanding of how bad it really is…….
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@Lori9999 Yes, the 1881 Census has been reported as having the same type of issues and does highly impact Huron County and others. Your question of "whether or not FS has an understanding of how bad it really is" is valid. That's the goal of all of us working with Community leaders to flesh out the amount of impact on our search tools. The engineers are not generally FH researchers but they do understand numbers.
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