Why would a birth place be inconsistent with the place in a S WWI Draft Registration Card?
Below is copied from a person's Research Assistance Quality Details. I don't understand why the birth and draft registration places noted below would need to be consistent. Naturalized citizens were required to register for the draft, but obviously wouldn't do it in the place they were born. Is there something I need to fix other than dismissing it?
Source Consistency
- This person has a birth place of Kville, Uddevalla, Bohuslan, Goteborgs, Sweden, which does not match the place Gary, Lake, Indiana, United States.Carl Christensen, "United States, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918"
Answers
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Can you share the PID (profile identifying code) for the person in the FS Tree? It's a lot easier when we can see exactly what has been added to the profile, and what the DQS algorithm is pointing out.
Also, there's a dedicated group for DQS Feedback and questions.0 -
The Person ID is GTSG-YY4. For his first WWI Draft Registration source (there are two of them), the record metadata says the birthplace is Gary, Indiana. That's what the Data Quality Score is comparing, so it makes sense that an inconsistency would be noted.
However, the actual image of the record mentions Gary, Indiana, but only as the place of residence (not the birthplace), so the record metadata has a mistake. But that's a problem with the metadata, not with the DQS algorithm.
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I assume this is the record you are looking at: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:7ZM3-MZN2?lang=en
If you are careful and thorough in your research so that you are entering accurate information on Family Tree profiles, you will find that the vast majority of these consistency flags are due to indexing errors, problems with the format of the index, normal and expected information variations in records (such as different birth years from one census to the next), or insignificant spelling variants.
Looking at the image of the record, there is nowhere on the draft card that has a line for birth place, just his birth year. I don't have any idea what the instructions were for indexing these records, but either the instructions as formulated years ago were "if there is no birth place enter the current residence as the birth place" or the indexer did not follow the instructions to leave the birth place blank if there was no birth place on the records, but clearly there was no thought that in the distant future the "birth place" indexed from the card would be compared in any way to the correct birth place recorded on a Family Tree profile.
Is there anything you can do besides just dismissing it? You could request that this entire set of records be corrected and all "birth places" relabeled as "residence" which will likely take a long time to be taken care of. Or you can, if you would like, go into the image viewer and edit the index by deleting the birth place and adding a residence of Gary, Indiana:
If you do this, then after the change syncs through the system, then the consistency flag will disappear.
Look at it this way, the Data Quality checker is checking the quality of both the Family Tree profile and the indexed records. You can use it to improve the profile and improve the indexes.
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By the way, I have no complaint with these kinds of flags because if this had been real instead of an indexing error, then this would not have been the correct draft card for your Carl and a nice catch to get that source off of your Carl's record.
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@Alan E. Brown Just a quick clarifying question. Terminology is tricky with FamilySearch because the content is so complex. Such things as person vs profile and exactly what a person posting in Community means when they refer to a record often make the first reply to a post be "what do you mean?" I've always assumed when people refer to the metadata of an index, they are referring to the background overall organizing data behind the data such as the name of the collection and the originating film number which we users certainly have no control over and most of which we can't even see.
When you stated that this record has a metadata error in the location, did you mean that there is an additional, background, general assignment of the Gary, Indiana, location to a group of these draft cards that came from one draft office in Gary, Indiana, or did you just mean the indexed information, which I have always just called the data, that @Charlotte8746 can correct?
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@Gordon Collett Thanks for asking for a clarification; terminology is often ambiguous.
I was referring for the indexed data for this record, but with a presumption that the whole collection (or at least many records within the collection) had a metadata problem where the value in residence field of the form may have been placed in the birthplace field of the indexed data. Without examining the collection closely (which I have no inclination to do), I can't know whether it is a problem with an isolated record or many or all records in the collection.
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Thanks for the clarification.
Checking the surrounding records from image 5450 through 5460 (Carl is image 5456), I see:
5450 - No birth place, residence incorrectly indexed as birth place
5451 - No birth place, country of citizenship probably indexed correctly as birth place
5452 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5453 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5454 - No birth place, country of citizenship probably indexed correctly as birth place
5455 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5456 - No birth place, residence incorrectly indexed as birth place
5457 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5458 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5459 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
5460 - Has birth place line, correctly indexed
So out of these 11 images, only 2 are indexed incorrectly. Interesting to see that there are two styles of draft cards in this group. One has a line asking for birth place and those are the ones that were indexed properly. The other has no birth place line but if the man filling out the form was not a US citizen, there is a line asking what country they were a citizen of. Those were indexed by putting that country of citizenship as the birth place which does have a high probability of being correct. If the man was a US citizen, whether native born or naturalized, he did not fill out that country line. Those are the ones that were indexed by putting their current residence as their birth place. I wonder if there was something about the indexing template that made it so that the birth place could not be left blank and the instructions were to put the residence there if there was not birth place. This is certainly not the first instance of something being viewed as the best way to do things at the time turning out to cause unexpected problems down the road.
So there is no easy global fix of just transferring all the birth places in this group to be residences and deleting the birth place. In this sample, that would ruin the 9 correct ones! This means that these have to be corrected one by one as users find them and want to fix them. @Charlotte8746 are you going to do this or would you like me to?
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@Gordon Collett As I recall web indexing, the indexer was supposed to mark <blank> in any of the required fields ie birthplace if there was no information given on the image and you are correct, many volunteers didn't bother to read the image or they thought they were "helping".😂 You and many others are so wonderful at fixing errors, I can't help asking, is there a book(s) I could read to learn/understand how to do the same — help articles are great but one hardly knows what to read first. Is there an index or list of how-to articles for different records ie censuses etc - and a glossary of FS terminology would be a great blessing!
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 Unfortunately, I don't have any references for you. I've learned what I have for the most part through trial and error and a lot of practice. And clicking on everything that has even the slightest resemblance to a link to see what it does. And keeping forefront in my thoughts "What is happening here and why?" and working it out until I know.
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Thank you, I'll keep on trying😎
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Well, it has been four days and there is no sign that Charlotte ever came back to see any of these replies, the index has not been corrected, and the source consistency flag is still there. So I'm going to correct the index which should get rid of the flag for her eventually but post the following video so that if she does come here she can see how these can be fixed.
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