United States, Obituary Records, 2014-2023
Would @SerraNola be able to escalate the bad title for this collection? Multiple guests find it very confusing, but one guest, in particular, has had a very difficult and emotional experience as a result of it not making clear that this collection also holds information for Canadian persons in addition to those within the United States.
Answers
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It might be tricky trying to come up with a simple replacement title - when I just had a look for people named John Smith in that collection, while the majority were in the US, there were results from Canada, the UK, and Australia in just the first couple of pages.
The collection information doesn't appear to describe the scope - I did wonder if these were US newspapers referring to Canadian citizens, but no, both subject and newspaper of the few that I checked were outside the USA.
If the visitor was upset by seeing information about a recent or unknown death, I think that it would be more sensible to warn any visitors that they might see such information, regardless of collection title, rather than try to chase down a never ending series of refinements to collection titles.
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According to the description on the collection landing page, that record set is supplied by an outside source. It's likely that the title comes from that source and was not chosen/created by FamilySearch.
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Thank you. If you're able to look it up, the ticket number from the email was Ticket #1703275, and it was a very sensitive concern. Someone told me to reach out to you and she said that many Canadian guests are confused about this. She just said that the collection contains U.S. and Canadian obits. It was a record for the guest's father. It was a recent passing and the only thing that was a surprise for her was seeing him listed as being from the U.S. as opposed to Canada. She recommended that since we can't edit the records themselves, perhaps we could at least request the title be edited. If the collection does cover other parts of the world as well, could it say something like North America…….? I'll leave it to you. Thanks so much for your reply.
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@hgwill60 Adrian and I are not support staff. We're users of the website who try assist others when we can. We have no access to Tickets submitted to FamilySearch.
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And, as you said, it looks like it wasn't made by FamilySearch anyway. Index courtesy of Domega, Inc. That is a separate data aggregation company.
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@SerraNola The original message I sent was per my supervisor. If the title for this collection can not be amended, perhaps because FamilySearch did not create it, could the description for it be updated to include the fact that countries other than the United States may be represented within it? I'll leave all of it in your capable hands. Thank you! https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/5000145
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@hgwill60 This collection contains obituaries from the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, Guam, New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, and Ireland. Should we call it "United States, Canada, and Various other Countries, Obituary Records, 2014-2023"? Does anybody have a better suggestion?
Also, many of these are computer indexed with only one place name so auto-standardizing created numerous place errors. I can see where that could be emotional for someone whose close relative had recently passed away. These errors can be edited if there is a camera icon even though the edit button is grayed out on the index details page.
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With regard to the choice of title, there are many obituaries in the collection that predate the year 2014.
There are also many errors in this collection. Apart from the auto-standardization problems mentioned by @SerraNola, I have found many cases where the event date (presumably the obituary publication date) was recent (e.g. some time in 2022) where the death occurred over a decade earlier. The transcripts show that the obituary is a death notice (with details of visitation hours and funeral arrangements) and not an In Memoriam notice published some years later. I have no idea where the publication date has come from, unless it is related to the date that the index was created or the record was scanned.
There used to be a message in the record viewer display for these records, warning that the record was created by a computer and offering a means to submit a request for correction. That message vanished some time ago; I can only speculate on the reason for its disappearance. I don't know where the correction requests went, or if anything was ever done with them.
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@SerraNola Given the breadth of coverage of the collection, I would think just Obituary Records (with a more accurate date range perhaps) would be an adequate title with the collection page describing countries included.
Those of us in support are getting loud complaints from our friends in Canada about the US identification of the collection.1 -
We are also getting a lot of comments about the articles in the collection that are not obituaries. They are mostly related to Joseph Biden and he is marked in the record details page as deceased. See:
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XMZ1-L77T?lang=en as one of many examples.
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All of these issues have been reported to engineering and are being discussed. I do not have any updates yet, but thanks to all for providing important feedback.
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@CraigWArmstrong - as an aside, the URL you provide doesn't appear to be a good example. That particular index record clearly says at the top that he is mentioned in the Obit of someone and there doesn't appear to be any Death date, etc. So providing people actually read, that particular one isn't an issue.
However, when I searched that collection for "Joe Biden", I did find, as you can probably guess, numerous index records with a Death Date for him that is the publication date, according to the text of the "Obit" (which isn't even an Obit, as you said). There are also other news reports coming through as Obits that are for people like "Kamala Joe Biden"…
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