Search Records on Ancestry -- Birth Locations
I've been finding that when I jump over to Ancestry to search there using the 'link' on a PID that the birth location 'carried over' to Ancestry search engine is often not what I expected due to a 'Non-standard' birth location. In this example when I transition to Ancestry Search the Birth location used on Ancestry will be Clark Missouri, the recommended 'Standard Place' and not Oklahoma. I need to make an edit on Ancestry to change birth location to Oklahoma. Guess I could just fix the Birthplace before I go over to Ancestry which is what I really should do anyway. But the Clark County Standard Place for Oklahoma is something I've been seeing alot recently which is another question as to why….????
Best Answers
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If you do a search for "auto-standardization" in the main search field for Community, you will get this result: https://community.familysearch.org/en/search?domain=all_content&query=auto-standardization&scope=site&source=community and see multiple postings about this unfortunate issue.
In brief, a couple of years ago FamilySearch ran a routine against all the place names in the historical records to get them to match places in the Places Database. Apparently this worked great 99.9% of the time, but when there are billions of records, that last 0.1% of the time was still a bit of a disaster and produced what you are running into. We've been told corrections are being made but this is a slow process.
There is also a problem in the search routines and source linker that if a place name is incomplete or abbreviated in a record, a standardized version is made up on the fly but is very often wrong. For example, in one census collection I have worked in, people are recorded as being born in SB which was an abbreviation for Søndre Bergenhus, Norway, and the search results list and the source linker turns this into Solomon Islands because SB is in the Places Database as an abbreviation for that country.
For now, we just have to be very cautious with place names both when adding them to Family Tree through the Source Linker and when searching.
If you would post links to the two sources you show in the image you posted, I might be able to explain what is going on in your example.
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In your screenshot, "Clark, Missouri, United States" is not (merely) the suggested standard, it is the selected standard. That is, some human at some point clicked a button that told the computer "yes, use this database entry for this event's location". That's why the search on Ancestry gets Clark, Missouri for the birthplace field.
(I think the error rate on autostandardization is much higher than a tenth of a percent. I haven't done a search on FS in five years now where it wasn't a serious factor. Most of the time, the result is not precisely wrong, just utterly useless: only the country instead of the actual location. That level of error affects easily half of the records I work with. Counting only "actually wrong" results, I suppose the percentage may be in the single digits. No, an error rate of a percent or two doesn't sound too bad — until you consider that one percent of one billion is ten million. Ten million minutes is nineteen years. They're never going to get them all fixed.)
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