Thoughts on Correcting Errors in the Records

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Lila Davis said: Can someone PLEASE review 1940 South Carolina #005461907. The handwriting is different but consistent and there are serious errors in the arbitration of this page. Some of these are my own family and right now they will be forever incorrect in the 1940 index.

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Jean Keener said: I whole heartly agree with you. I've been trying for 2 years to have the spelling of my maternal grandmother's name corrected on her marriage record. I'm also seeing many transcribing mistakes on Ancestry. I've come to the conclusion the indexers are in too much of a hurry or just can read simple English. I have a copy of the original marrage record & how her name was misspelled is beyond me.

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Tom Huber said: I dislike reminding project leadership of the mistakes made when newFamilySearch was put into place and all the problems associated with those mistakes, many of which we are just now able to start correcting through Family Tree.

Please, please, please, do not make the same mistake with the massive indexing projects now underway by failing to fully address the need to make corrections to the indexing errors being introduced into the system. Indexing errors are costly, in terms of wasted hours spent trying to figure out how to find a misspelled name in an index. While some of the search features help narrow down the records, not being able to correct misspelled indexes produces records that are not acceptable and as the public is allowed into Family Tree, the Church once again will receive well deserved criticism by professionals and amateurs alike for sloppy work. Ancestry.com, for all its shortcomings, had the foresight to provide a means to correct badly indexed entries. There is no reason why the Church should not have at least learned from the ancestry.com example and provide the same level of service.

Again, I ask that a method to correct entry errors be made the highest possible priority before we go much further down the road and have to once again, change tires at 60 mph.

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Eva Kay Cook said: I hope we will be able to make corrections in our own personal family histories soon. I have found errors in marriages, etc, and I am worried that those who come after me will have the wrong information. I have been told that it will all be straightened out in our spirit world, but I feel frustrated about it here.

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Steven Craig Craven said: On a whim, and knowing that in the not-distant future I will be working with my children in teaching them to search for thier ancestral records, I "researched" the 1940s census records for my father, and his father's family. I could not find my father in a record search - his given name is "Norville." So did the record search of my grandfather (Wilford) and found the family census record. My father's name was indexed as "Gorville." I can see based on the handwriting if looking only at my father's record how this could have happened - but in looking at the two or three subsequent pages, there is a clear and obvious difference in the way the capital G and N are written - - No excuse, however, will accrue for my uncle (Melford) for being recorded as "Wilford Jr."

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Juanell Marsh said: My father in law's name was spelled wrong on one of the items that I found. Also his wife's name was spelled wrong. I do not understand how this is so rampant, and yet they do not offer us a correction.

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Valle Lindsey said: The task of the 1940 census has been mammoth and I have also spent many hours helping. It is very difficult to get it right sometimes, but I too have found a name that should have been extracted Walter B Hamm and was extracted Wallis B Hanne. Looking forward to the time when these things can be corrected. I am hopeful the technology will happen soon for the sake of everyone who is searching. Thanks for all of your hard work.

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Stanley George Peery said: We in the Church are fairly meticulous in keeping good records and seems to be something out of wack that doesn't allow for corrections to our personal family names (lines). I realize it takes time to develop software (I designed computers for 30 yrs). Maybe a solution to many frustrated users, specially those that know their lineage, would be to discontinue the "indexing" until the software is developed to correct the acknowledged errors commited by indexing. We are admonished by the Prophet to do our individual genealogy for our own salvation. I would hope that you all would have a simiular motovation in assisting us to get our genealogy correct. Thank you in advance for you continued efforts.
S George Peery

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Larry F. Brasher said: My ancestor Reuben Hall is listed as a female in the 1850 census, and his name is indexed as Rudeen on Family Search (Ancestry has it correct). In the census it is clearly Rueben (SP)- not sure how they got Rudeen. Perhaps the incorrect gender threw them off. In the 1860 census, the gender is listed correctly. It would be very helpful in avoiding future erros to be able to both:

1 - Correct transcription errors - Rueben instead of Rudeen, in this case.
2 - Add notes to point out entry errors in the original document - i.e. in this case indicating that Rueben is a male and is correctly shown as such in the 1860 cenus for the same family.

Thanks for all your work.

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Michelle said: I find it very difficult to believe this website is unable to add a system for correcting indexing errors. Just look at ancestry.com. They have it. So, if ancestry.com can do it, why can't familysearch? Don't tell me it's a matter of not enough money to put towards fixing the problem. The LDS Church owns this site and they have more than enough money.

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Patricia Ray said: There should be some way to make simple changes like obvious simple errors in the name of one person in the family having a different spelling than the rest. For instance my great great grandmother's name shows her last name as Packer whereas everyone else in the family was named Parker. It could be because her husband was a glass PACKER!!

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Dorothy Usa said: After just a couple months using Family Search, I have found 1 last name error and 2 surname errors. If we could at least be notified when a fix is available, then we could provide information regarding the correction needed. I also input data, and find it discouraging that families who know of errors have no way to correct them. The index would be so much more valuable if corrections were possible.

When is it expected that there will be a solution to correcting errors?

Dorothy Usa

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Russell Crosbie said: I was doing work on my wife family and found one family member listed with the correct date of birth, married to the same woman, but two different sets of parents, one set is really his grandparents, two different places of birth, also listed were two different dates and places of death.
the needs tobe a way to fix these problems

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Naomi Johnson said: I understand a reluctance to allow millions of people the access to change indexed data, but I don't understand how it could be so difficult to add fields to reflect alternate, i.e., corrected spellings to names. Those alternate fields could be searchable, too. It would be nice to see my grandmother's name correctly reflected in the 1930 census as Roxie alongside the inept indexer's interpretation: Raxil. Or my great-great grandfather's last name given the correct alternate of Stewart rather than the transcriber's miskeyed 'Setwart' in the 1880 census.

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Verna Florida said: The children of Alvin P. Curnel & Estelle are Eliane Curnel, Greathel, Leona Oma. Odell, Thelma, Audie Odis, Alva, Leva, Charles William (C.W), Hollis, Marjory Jean, my mother, and Vivian.
Not Rena, Josie, or Sarah.

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Kenneth Veneron said: I understand the reluctance to correct an indexing error, however when the surname as placed in thee census is 100% readable and 2 indexers both spelled the surname incorrectly it seems that anyone with a little smarts would be able to make the correction.
I am talking about the Surname 'OSTRUM" in a family record in NY state in 1940. The census taker spelled it right 1 family member is still alive and agrees that is the proper spelling however 2 indexers decided that it should be spelled "OSTRUN"

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Anita Herway said: I am also amazed you cannot fix problems. Having 4 sets of parents listed is an obvious mistake. Knowing the correct parents and not being able to denote that information is hard to ignore. I'm not sure the tree should have been public until there is a system for corrections in place.

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Andrea Holycross Burke said: I have found an obvious mistake when researching for someone buried at a local cemetery, the search being done for a friend's family. The marriage record, which I found on FamilySearch, was for Catherine Bell, when I found it the first time on FamlySearch it was listed as Catherine Ball. This mistake was obvious. I cannot fathom how it slipped by the two extractors and the arbitrator! The writing on the original was perfect and clear!

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Andrea Holycross Burke said: One way to correct the errors in familysearch as it is now, is to add a box where signed-in patrons can add a word or phrase that represents how they see the original record. For instance, I found Catherine Ball in the Historical Records search. I clicked on her name, and found that I could click to see the original record. The original read very clearly: Catherine Bell. In this case I would click on a box or link that would add the name that I saw on the reocord: "Bell". The system could keep oh, perhaps 5 or so different interpretations of the mistake as seen by other viewers. That would help tremendously in accuracy of transcription and help others researching those family lines.

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William Eliot Staten said: When you get a frowny face, never let it stay
Turn that frown right upside down and smile that frown away!

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Jane Wohner said: Remember people its is FREE!

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Nancy Stanton Lasater said: Much to my regret, when I do find a mistake that I can justify from my own knowledge, I can correct it only on ancestry.com. The errors are more numerous on ancestry, but I have the option to correct it on Ancestry.

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mary mcaninch said: I worked on the indexing. I understand the issues of indexing, I recently found because a distant cousin who located my ancestor on Danish census and taught me to use Danish searches and also found my immigrant ancestors parents...because of their names I found the misspelling in the marriage index of the remarriage....a 20 year blank has been completed and a family member found. Correcting it would assist others..I have seen the Ancestry corrections...and some are wrong too.. I hope one day we can find a solution to the need. Thank you

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Gwyneth Thomas said: I just wish someone could put Johannesburg in South Africa into Transvaal, instead of the Cape Province. At least then foreigners could actually establish that Johannesburg is a very large city of 20 million people.

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albertsmommy said: I'd like to be able to remove the asterisk from my great-grandmother's name. That's not a transcription error, that's a blatant mistake. The transcription rules clearly state that you don't add punctuation. Though I do understand why some of the transcriptions are as dreadful as they are. I've picked up some partial batches that had been transcribed by someone who could neither read nor spell. Their 'guesses' were totally off the mark. Some people should not be allowed to transcribe.

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rotkapchen said: I have my own theory that when the site was set up, almost every support person I talked to spoke like a robot about 'combining records'. And I know that they were not allowed to submit a request without combining records. Surely with all of the dirty data in the system, and the false positives that the current software allows for, that most of the combine errors were done by the support staff themselves.

What I am at a total loss for is why with such a large collection of data there is not software in place to check for data quality -- that is, it should be very obvious to data quality 'sniffing' software that a collection of records that include 6 different last names is a high candidate for data quality issues.

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rotkapchen said: albertsmommy For those of us who spend hundreds of hours working to correct blatant errors an asterisk is an extremely small nit to worry about. But I can tell you that these things have been put in place in the past for some really good reasons. There are some people who have adopted conventions for making entries so that they can visually differentiate their entries from others (in the cases where some individuals are going through their entire family history to 'validate' the data and correct errors).

For others, it's an ego thing, which doesn't really count.

And lastly, in the cases where there are people of the same name so hopelessly intertwined with commingled data of different people, when we are trying to 'find' a particular person in a collection of spouse records, the only way to 'tell' the difference is to make the name visually different. Some people do that with whatever characters they can so they can 'find' the records in order to help manage them (since the system was never designed for one of the primary tasks of its lifecycle -- data management).

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Alan Scott Loveless said: I have worked both as an indexer and an arbitrator, and now I have also gone back and looked at my parents' families and found errors in the spellings of my maternal grandmother's name and in my father's sister's name. In both cases I can clearly see how the mistakes were made. The capital "V" in my aunt's name looks like a "D" due to handwriting (although the "e" at the end is clear, yet was still rendered an "a" apparently by both indexers), and the "i" in my grandmother's name was rendered an "e" apparently because the dot is too faint or nonexistent above it. The mistakes are clear to me because I know what I am looking at, while to the indexers they were both strangers. And if the indexers both made the same mistake, the arbitrator would likely never see it. Can't we insert another level of review that can allow for corrections by family members - after arbitration? We have both the personal information and the motivation to get it right.

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chuckb said: Thanks so much for your answer to my correctioning question. I hope that when this finally becomes available for us to correct mistakes that you will post that in your newsletter.
Thanks again,
Charles Brennaaun

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Theresa Alice Fernstrom said: Not so...Ancestry used to have a system whereby one could send them a message with details of what needed to be corrected. They no longer provide that same service. Now you are given three choices only of "something wrong on the page" to check off. No opportunity whatsoever to explain where the problem is....so how do they know where the error is in order to correct it? They have many terribly mis-transcribed names. I couldn't find myself on the 1940 census and when finally did they had my surname beginning with a T instead of an L. In another case with the same surname they had it transcribed as Husing instead of Lessing??!! They have plenty of room for improvement as well not just the LDS Church. People transcribing need to be much more careful as well while indexing and be more concerned with quality instead of quantity.