Another Placename Error Report (Declaration of Intention)

Adrian Bruce1

This one baffles me… URL https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:68P4-34DJ contains the Declaration of Intention for Citizenship of my great-great aunt Augusta Barclay Bruce. The collection is "United States, Missouri, Naturalization Records, 1843-1991".

On that URL, the Event Place (Original) = "Western District, Missouri" (which is the court that's involved). That's fine.

This has apparently produced Event Place = "New London, New London, Connecticut, United States"

Seriously? Not one word in Event Place (Original) matches the resultant Event Place. (Well, apart perhaps from "United States" which may be part of the metadata.) It's as if the choice is totally random…. 😕 The apparent randomness of the hallucination(?) is the only reason I've raised this one.

@Ashlee C. - do you still have the dubious please of passing these on? I'd be grateful if you could, thanks.

SerraNola

@Adrian Bruce1 As you might have guessed, all 32 films show the place name as New London Connecticut. I believe this may have started as a cataloging error which then transferred to RMS data on each film. There are actual naturalization records for New London in the catalog, so these may have gotten mixed in with them, for whatever reason. If you look at the header in the film viewer and hover, the pop up box shows "New London" is there:

This is a similar error to the one found in the 1900 Census. In that collection, the RMS data for each film shows one county so if more than one county is on the film, all the others will have been changed to the same county shown in the header. There are many other collections with the same error and it is a high priority for engineers working on a solution. I will add this one to the list. Thanks for reporting.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

@SerraNola has taken the lead on these, I believe, Adrian.

The place issue may have been caused by Augusta's last residence "East London, South Africa." Not logical, but possible.

Adrian Bruce1

(Yes, I did look at East London but I didn't see any machine readable version of East London.)

"Film" 106562817 (which contains Augusta's form) is catalogued (thank you, good old-fashioned Catalogue!) as part of "Connecticut, New London County, naturalization records". The physical discrepancy between Connecticut and Missouri is about half the width of the USA isn't it?

I have zero intention of checking the other films.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

🙄 #HappyNewYear
You may remember one I reported a year or so ago, for a death in the East River in New York that wound up categorized as a death in Eritrea, apparently due to the E of East.