Transcription error
The place of birth on the birth record for Geneva D. Literal [Litteral] has been transcribed as Whitley City, McCreary County, Kentucky. The original is available on Ancestry.com, and it has Whitley County, Kentucky on it. Can this please be corrected? It is at https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FWNZ-NBM?lang=en
Thank you!
Answers
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@PatsyGadberry
That's not a transcription error but a place autostandardization algorithm issue. You'll find many discussions on the topic here in the Community.
The algorithm tried to match up all the place names used in the record indexes with standard places. The algorithm got most of them correct, but with so many records, even a small error percentage means many incorrect records.
The clue is the use of the word (original) as shown in this screenshot:
Unfortunately, since the image is not available on FamilySearch, users can't edit the place.
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McCreary is not in the original. On FamilySearch the standardized place would be Whitley, Kentucky. It added a county that was not there. Because it is an error, people who save it as a source think that is the correct place of birth. I know that users cannot edit it, but the folks in charge here can.
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Unless it is a widespread error - all records from that time/location, for example - it is unlikely that FamilySearch staff would institute a repair. Staff is small with many demands on their time.
@SerraNola please and thanks.
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@PatsyGadberry This record is from a group of christening records for Whitley County, Kentucky. Whenever you see in the Document Information an indexing batch with a number starting with C (christenings), M (marriages) or B (burials), it's likely to be a Legacy Collection.
A Legacy Collection is a group of records from the IGI (International Genealogical Index). The IGI contains records transcribed directly from source material by volunteers from the mid-1900's through 2008. FamilySearch makes the record images available whenever the archival contract allows, but all Legacy Collections are no longer being edited nor are any additional records being added.
For a time there was an effort to compile a list of known errors but it has not been updated since 2020 and I don't usually find current place name errors on the list. I cannot explain where "McCreary" came from except that it is an adjacent county so the film may have been labeled with both. The "Whitley City" is a common error made by the auto-standardization algorithm to change a county to a town by the same name. (The standardizing was not an attempt to edit the collection but a necessary move of all records to a new storage system.)
I hope this answers your questions and sorry that the errors will not be fixed. Be sure to make a note with the source, explaining that the transcription is not correct.
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Thank you for the information. Whitley City is in McCreary County. But the batch the document was in was a group of counties that started with W. I put a note on what I think is the source, as well as a note regarding the individual the birth record is for. Thanks, again!
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