Location Error Report- Derbyshire Censuses
@SerraNola I noticed multiple England censuses put Cubley, Derbyshire into Staffordshire. Ancestry has these at Derbyshire and the kids' birthplaces also reflect Derbyshire.
Thank you!
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I think the only fix for this would be to program the system to ignore the Registration District or at least put more weight on the town/parish name. I will document this but it doesn't neatly fit into any of my categories.
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@GFre and @SerraNola - this looks a bit odd. I have only looked at the 1851 entry and felt myself disappearing so far down a rabbit hole that even I dared go no further!!
Mary Malbine (the 1851 example) is on a census page (on FindMyPast) where the only place names on the image are 2 occurrences of "Cubley". GENUKI confirms that Cubley is in Derbyshire. If I scroll back to the beginning of that Enumeration District (ED), it says it's in the "County and Parliamentary Division" of South Derby[shire]. So far so Derbyshire… But then I noticed that the same image for the ED says "Superintendent Registrar's District" of Uttoxeter, which is in Staffordshire.
Now, it is a fact that causes people to disappear into rabbit holes like this, that British county allocations are not always consistent for different purposes and that sometimes the census people moved places from one county into the next to ensure that Enumeration Districts(???) were always in one single county for the purposes of census analysis. I fear that we have something similar here.
If I look at the FindMyPast index for Mary Malbine, her full address is "Lodge Farm, Cubley, Uttoxeter, Derbyshire, England". Uttoxeter is in Staffordshire, as I say.
Her County on the index is Derbyshire.
Her Registration District is Uttoxeter (in Staffordshire).
The TNA Reference on the index is HO 107/2010 which, according to the TNA Catalogue is "Registration District: 374. UTTOXETER" and is split between 2 Sub-Districts in Staffordshire and 1 in Derbyshire.
Basically, if FMP is giving "Cubley, Uttoxeter", as it is, poor FamilySearch is on a loser from the start - does it use the geographic county for Cubley or for Uttoxeter? 😥
I have no simple answers for this because I fear that the necessary unravelling of the FMP Index may open a Pandora's Box!!!
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This is another example. Here, Osleston and Thurvaston, Derbyshire has turned into just Staffordshire in the source linker. This is consistent forwards and back, e.g. this 1901 census.
I find it's pretty confusing when the censuses suddenly switch to Staffordshire from Derbyshire because it makes it look like the family moved. Another issue is that people won't attach the census because it looks like it's in the wrong place. Also, the weird thing about the above examples is that there's no city attached, probably because there isn't such an area in Staffordshire. Overall, it's just a lot of confusion.
Thank you for going down the rabbit hole, @Adrian Bruce1. It's so helpful to have some insight into what might have happened. I'm hopeful FamilySearch can figure out a standardization!
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