Problems with the England & Wales Census collections never seem to go away

LegacyUser

Paul said: Over the years, multiple problems in the way the England & Wales census collections have been handled have been reported here. Most recently, these have related to the 1881 collection. There are currently two sets of these indexed records available. One, carrying a date of 2017, is the one whose records can be accessed via https://www.familysearch.org/search/. However, sources with a 2018 date are searchable through the Sources sections of IDs, if users managed to attach them at an earlier date.

Most times when a collection is subject to an update by Find My Past there seems to be a problem. Sometimes the updated records appear seamlessly, having "come across" with the same URL as the corresponding ones they are superseding. However, too often this does not happen and there are then 2 URLs for the "same" source. It is clear (from viewing in the Sources section) when this has happened and which source is now retired, as the retired one no longer carries a date (e.g. 1881).

Unfortunately, problems that have occurred during my time using FamilySearch have included a much-less detailed version of the 1851 collection appearing, then being withdrawn, but the URL used in the subsequent update being that of an earlier version of this collection. Hence, all the sources I had marked "old / retired version" now represented the current version - and, of course, the ones marked "new / revised" version although not retired / removed, contained very sparse detail.

With the 1881 collection, the 2018 dated collection has more detailed information than the 2017 one. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, it is the 2017 version that is available to attach from https://www.familysearch.org/search/. I believe the problems here could be related to the current "410 - Record removed" problem. In this case, the records do appear to have been restored, but the "wrong way round".

Would someone at FamilySearch please take note of this serious problem: these collections each contain millions of records, so something going wrong is liable to affect many Family Tree users. I have suggested liaison with Find My Past when a known update is about to take place. If the issue is not addressed I'm sure these problems will go on and on, causing confusion and unnecessary loss of valuable information from relating FamilySearch sources.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I think one of the problems is using another site's index of records when FS should probably either reindex the records through its volunteers, or make a concerted effort to leave the earlier index alone, suggest users access the FMP index and relate it to the records on FS.

I have done that very thing (relate another site's (index) records with FS's) with U.S. Census Enumerations where the FS index could not be used to locate my relative, but the Ancestry index could. Because Ancestry's index search would search the user-suggested corrections, it was much better than FS's index.