Wrong Residence on christening record
Event is Flint, Wales but Residence is Cheshire, England. Many records with the same problem. Seems like a system problem.
Answers
-
According to the catalog description for the relevant DGS, 4011853, the records are held in Cheshire.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/koha:602705
@m how Could you please take a look? Thank you.
2 -
@starkeypd - in fairness I sat looking at that Residence for some time (and it's not a million miles from me) before I realised what it says - it's something like "Betti'd" (the "d" is a superscript) which is short for "Bettisfield".
I'm not sure how a non-local is supposed to work that out or what rules might help, but certainly "Cheshire" seems unhelpful as a residence.
2 -
@starkeypd These records apparently are archived in Cheshire, but have incorrectly been titled as Cheshire instead of Hanmer, Flintshire, Wales. They also should not be in the Cheshire Record Collection and I will send this in to be corrected. They seem to be fine in the catalog.
As to the residence in the index, that's puzzling. The actual residence was never indexed. To edit, I would simply delete "Residence" as an event.
1 -
There are two problems that cause confusion when it comes to several FamilySearch record sets for England & Wales.
Firstly, there is type found here, whereby a collection is titled according to the location of the record repository where it is held and/or originally filmed.
Secondly, where the same (parish) name is indexed as the Residence, regardless of what is recorded in the Residence field in the original entry.
The first example is quite common in FamilySearch collections. I have found many Durham parish records under a "Northumberland Non-conformist" heading and can only assume they are/were held at Newcastle Central Library and filmed at the same time as those records that genuinely do relate to non-conformist records for Northumberland. There is also a collection - comprising of non-conformist baptism for different English counties - which (through its title) implies they all relate to Lancashire. Again, this appears to be connected with the location of the record repository.
The other issue (which also affects the collection in question here) is where the residence has obviously never been indexed, but has been added at a later stage in the process of putting the records online.
A set I once examined had the name of the Yorkshire parish as the Residence in every record, whereas the Residence column on the original pages of the baptism register had details of the true place of residence: in one example over a hundred miles from the parish itself!
These problems are not confined to FamilySearch. On the Find My Past website, I found a complete set of records that appeared under the names of two parishes. It seems this was due to the first set appearing under the correct parish name, but a further indexing showed the name of the parish which was the first item on the film from which the records were indexed.
Hopefully, FamilySearch is now addressing these errors: sadly, in the past I have had a very negative response to my requests to make corrections that would put an end to the confusion they cause. We can all accept that it is not practicable to correct isolated errors, but those that affect many thousands of records in the same collection should surely be addressed.
2 -
Re the Residence - I would have a little less concern for some of these indexing issues if I had the confidence that researchers would apply some sense with regard to using the values from indexes.
For instance, all too often the date of death is set to the date of burial - yes, it happens, I'm sure but when the original source record only mentions the burial date, there is no justification for it. Especially if the burial date is then left empty!
More relevant to @Paul W's comment above is when the name of the church is used as the place of residence. Does anyone consider that this implies that the person actually lived in the church itself? Really?
Basically, there are (roughly) 3 opportunities to get things right:
- The indexing;
- The creation of the source record with its generated standardised placenames etc;
- The use of that data on a profile.
I can't help thinking that I would be a little more tolerant of issues with items 1 & 2 if I had confidence that item 3 would catch remaining issues.
2 -
Adrian brings up a point that has bothered me since my earliest days as a new researcher:
Does anyone consider that this implies that the person actually lived in the church itself? Really?
Much of my research, especially when I first started, was in the Roman Catholic records of the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. The earlier indexes of baptisms from those churches show the birth as occurring in the church. And, some of the indexes of cemetery records show the place of death as the cemetery.
2
