Find a Grave Index cemetery name matches, but location does not
Typically, when there is a FamilySearch "Find a Grave Index" entry to be added to the Burial field, I have had to copy-paste the cemetery name in front of the location. I had hoped that FamilySearch would figure out a way to have the cemetery name included automatically. Very recently, it seems like that has been happening. Unfortunately, while the cemetery name matches what is on Find a Grave, the location frequently does not. This is a major problem.
As an example, below are the FamilySearch Find a Grave Index entry for Ellen Rose (Connell) Gannon and her actual Find a Grave entry. As you can see, the cemetery name (Holy Sepulchre Cemetery) matches, but the location in the index is in Gretna, Nebraska, while the actual location is Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania. I have come across many other instances like this.
Before, I had to open up the Find a Grave page to copy-paste the cemetery name into the Burial field. Now, it is arguably worse, because people might just assume that the autofilled Burial field is correct (and not look at the Find a Grave page), which will cause the completely wrong location to be entered.
Answers
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Here is another example (there are many). Gordon Barry Kennedy's cemetery is Westminster Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, but the index autofills with Westminster Cemetery in Westminster, Ohio.
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This may be related to the following topic, and perhaps they should be moved to the Source Linker community area (based on other things I have seen here): Why are there wildly different places on this document? — FamilySearch Community
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@SteveLinke that other discussion is really about the Records and their indexing, not specifically about how sources would use those Records, so I don't personally think the Source Linker is relevant to it. It seems to me that your topic here is a different angle on the same matter, in that I found in my investigation there that the vast majority of my Records had no cemetery on their standardised place.
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I have attached hundreds (if not thousands) of Find a Grave sources for several years now, and, until about the last week or so, I have never seen the cemetery name located in the Source Linker—only the location. In those cases, the location has nearly always matched the Find a Grave memorial—like 99% of the time. Perhaps only when someone had made a change on Find a Grave after the index entry was created has it ever been questionable, which would seemingly be extremely rare, because the cemetery and its location is the underlying basis for those memorials. It is only very recently that the cemetery names have started appearing in the Source Linker, but now the locations tend to be messed up.
The reason I though they may be related is that there seem to be lists of cemeteries with the same name but different locations showing up.
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I suspect this is our old "friend" place-name standardization at work. I've seen several Findagrave records in FamilySearch this week that have the right town in the wrong state. When I opened the details, I could see the "original event" breadcrumb.
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVKD-BYPT?lang=en
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@SteveLinke This appears to be a different issue from your previous post. https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/190160/find-a-grave-memorials-were-unable-to-show-this-record
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Recently I have been experiencing (what I think are) similar problems with the place names from FindAGrave during the Source Linker process. I don't know if the FindAGrave entries are "indexed" incorrectly or if it's in the familysearch processing, but the place names definitely don't match. An example, (see PID:LXDY-22D) where the cemetery place should be "Redwood Memorial Mortuary and Cemetery, West Jordan, Salt Lake, Utah" but the entry from FindAGrave was "Redwood Cemetery, West Lebanon, Pike Township, Warren, Indiana" …. obviously, not close.
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Here is a screenshot of part of the results list from a records search I did on the FindAGrave collection. I have selected the first visible result. The red-marked event places in the list and the Record Information panel are all incorrect. The correct place (for the selected result) is marked in green. The correct places are all cemeteries in New Zealand whose names match but, in these cases, not even the offered country is correct.
A few weeks ago, I started seeing that the website source linker was sometimes adding the cemetery name to the suggested place that it offered the user. This is something that the FamilyTree Android app has been doing for several years; I started a discussion a year ago, suggesting this could be done on the website too. Maybe my suggestion is coming to fruition. I think that the problems that we are seeing in the source linker are, at least in part, caused by the standardizer, as Áine.ní.Donnghaile
described, because the same behaviour occurs outside of the source linker, e.g. in the record search results list.0 -
@JulianBrown38 see the post @SteveLinke links to. I did some detailed investigations and have reported this bug as a Records Issue which we gather is being looked into.
@shecorwe I can't see how closing that other post can prevent duplicate reports, or that it is even a good idea to do so (merging threads if necessary), especially if (as here) it adds evidence. My completed Records Issues form pointed the engineers back to the linked post for more information since 2000 characters was insufficient.
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