"New Zealand, Civil Records Indexes, 1800-1966" - Incorrect age units in death registration source
I have seen sources like this several times in recent days, all from the same collection. Here is an example for the death of Robina Hendry McKenzie. The birth and death dates are correct, but the age of 9 years is not.
"New Zealand, Civil Records Indexes, 1800-1966", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q24K-852T : Tue Jun 09 00:36:59 UTC 2026), Entry for Robina Hendry McKenzie, 1889.
The record on the New Zealand Births, Deaths & Marriages website has the correct age of 9 weeks:
Answers
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@JulianBrown38 I will send this along to our experts to see if anything can be done with the incorrect information. Thank you for bringing it to our attention and trying to make FamilySearch better.
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@sc woz and @JulianBrown38 Just a thought- 9W could be an indexing error, did you try editing it?
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@JulianBrown38 Do you have any examples where the correct age was not in "weeks"? I flipped through several hundred search results and found the age in "days", "months", and "years" but no "weeks", so it may be there was no matching field for "w".
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@SerraNola @JulianBrown38 I've seen "3 weeks" age in England Censuses circa 1881-1911 when children were born at home — since New Zealanders often emigrated from England United Kingdom, the 9W indexed as years should be edited to 9 Weeks — that's what I would do 😉
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Here is a death record for one of my aunts, Frances McKenzie. She lived for only 12 hours but FamilySearch's New Zealand, Civil Records Indexes, 1800-1966 collection displays her age as 12 years with the correct years of birth and death (both 1900). The NZ BDM website reports the correct age of 12 hours.
Here is the result of a search on the NZ BDM website:
Side note: I have just added Frances' death registration from this collection to her profile. She already had a source which had been manually created from the NZ BDM website by another user in March of this year; that source gives the correct age at death of 12 hours. I also had exactly the same information in my non-FS file from some time ago. I am certain that I looked for her death registration (in FS) at that time and did not find it. In the last month, I have found a large number of NZ birth and death registrations from the 1890s and 1900s that were not previously visible. The current timestamp of the collection is 6 June 2026, which may well be about the time that I started seeing an increase in the number of unattached BDM registrations, and, possibly, these incorrect age displays. As well, I think there may have been a change to the "Record Information" display format recently.
Prior to the middle of 1972, the NZ BDM death registration records contained only the age at death; thereafter, the date of birth as stated by the informant was recorded instead, if it was known. The age units may be Y, M, W, D, H or N.
The NZ BDM website does not explicitly display the dates of the birth, marriage or death events. Those can be found manually by repeated queries using the date filters. If this is not done, then the user will probably infer the year of the event from the registration number (yyyy/nnnnn). "yyyy" is almost always the year that the event was registered, which is not necessarily the year that the event occurred. (There are a few cases where, because of data errors, the "registration" year actually precedes the year in which the event occurred!)
The fact that FS correctly derives the birth year, using only the correct age and the inferred death year, but then displays the wrong age, suggests to me that this is a problem in the Record Information display processing.
@maryellenstevensbarnes1 The collection has no images, and is not editable. Also, the source data does have the correct age available (it calculates the birth year correctly from the inferred death year and age).
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@JulianBrown38 The underlying data for both of your examples reveals the original value as "9W" and "12H". You are correct that the error is only in the display, since birth year is calculated correctly. The standardizer does not properly handle W or H as a time unit and defaults to years.
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There is also an N value which I have seen a few times; it means "Minutes". If I do a search in the record collection, specifying an asterisk for the last name and exact birth and death ranges of identical years, the results all display as "days", "months" or "years" (apart from a few completely unexpected results where an exact date of birth is displayed and confirmed on the NZ BDM website).
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@JulianBrown38 We have received your Form Response. Thank you for bringing this record issue to our attention. This will allow the issue to be reviewed and investigated by the appropriate team.
To avoid confusion and duplicate reports, this discussion will now be closed while the investigation is underway. If additional information is needed, the team may reach out for further details.
Thank you for your patience, for helping improve FamilySearch records, and for being a valued member of the FamilySearch Community. We will provide an update if further information or a resolution becomes available.
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