Thoughts on Correcting Errors in the Records
Comments
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Barbara Engel said: You would think that entities as large as FS and Ancestry would have these professionals in house.
BTW indexers do the best they can considering the poor quality of the documents they are transcribing which also explains the mixed results with double and triple checking (as I don't think ANYONE can read the documents in question!) If the document has an incorrect but legible name the indexer must copy what is actually on the document and cannot be blamed for this. An even bigger problem I think is the information entered by family historians themselves. I won't even use ANY pedigree information in FS at all. If you look at a large part of the entries you will see errors, impossible dates, spellings etc originate with the family historians. Add to that the historical family members who were semi-illiterate themselves and entered THEIR OWN surnames in many different ways probably phonetically plus vital registrars, immigration officials, parish registers, land deeds and almost anyone who was filling out a document apparently did the same. I think this is also the only explanation for siblings spelling their names in different variations. What I do in these instances which cannot be corrected and no one can be blamed is to put my current modern spelling of my ancestor in brackets to confirm that this proven document is attached correctly to my history.
It does all get very frustrating but at least I think if we accept that the above is out of our hands and cannot be changed or corrected we can just get on with our research and do the best we can. BTW Ancestry.com has almost as many errors as FS so it's up to us to watch out for these and to double check our research and/or look for proven official sources.0 -
Patricia Casey said: It is very kind of you to stand up for the indexers. I know there are some who are excellelent and concientous "transcribers"/Indexers. However, not all are that aware of errors they make. Indexing became a sort of "contest" at one point here. A "HURRY UP" to get indexing done for the 1940 Census when it was released! I haven't even gone through all of my relatives/ancestors for that release yet. It got too frustrating. Yes...some writing in original census reports is difficult to read, but in the case of errors found in my experiences, more than a equal ammount were very ledgible and still there were very serious mistakes in transcribing! Totally unacceptable name mistakes... just guesses when a little study of those names would show the transcriber the true information!!!! Do they realize that their transciptions change our very line of research and family history if they make errors? I realize that all "transcribers" ie: Indexers are vollunteers.... but if they were paid employees making these errors, perhaps they would be reviewed and at least made aware of the errors they made... perhaps many would have been replaced. Perhaps they would have been made aware the importance of what they were Indexing.
Just saying..............................0 -
Barbara Engel said: Patricia, I agree completely that if a document is legible to you then it should have been legible to the at least 2 indexers and an arbitrator. These are the most annoying and frustrating things to find. Luckily you are double checking. It makes me crazy also to find a mother younger than her children and countless other errors made by ????? Who can possibly make these kinds of mistakes? When you look at pedigrees it seems to be family members themselves. Drives me crazy whomever is so careless. Don't see how this happens and not occasionally but in very high numbers! As my father used to say when even 2nd or 3rd cousins had married "I'm my own grandpa!" and in the case of many of THESE entries they sometimes create that exact scenario! So just in the case of indexers who cannot transcribe LEGIBLE entries the 'disease' is rampant throughout genealogy! It makes our work as family historians almost impossible in many cases! Not only that but I have quit using FS at all except for documents and have to double check many, many 'leaves' in ancestry.com as the errors are there by the thousands also. Grrrr...
PS: I agree with your statements regarding the careless indexers. Why are they even doing this at all? If you don't do your best and doing more harm than good why would you volunteer in the first place and waste many, many hours of time for yourself and the people who were supposed to benefit from this work? My defense was directed to those who transcribe 'errors' that are not their errors but are errors on the documents themselves and thus have to be transcribed exactly as seen.0 -
June Wittmer-Shawver said: I have used Ancestry.com; Familysearch.org and now fold3 and have gotten nothing but good results. Having been a genealogist for 40 years I appreciate the ancestry.com family of historical information and those who do the transcribing. I have found no errors that I could not resolve with just a bit of my own extra research.
Please be thankful for those people who are willing to donate their time and energy to give us this information. With out them there would not be a place to start your/our research.
Thank you Ancestry0 -
June Wittmer-Shawver said: One other comment: try using other sites that are available including cemeteries and old obituary listings. There are sites where you can exchange information also.
You also needed to remember that in early times those doing the records and censuses were not well educated and often guessed at spellings. In German families the children were called by their middle names and this can make things confusing when you have a record for Johann Jacob //// who was put in the census as Jacob /////. My last name Wittmer is also listed as Whitmore, Widnar and Whitmer because that is the way the writer heard them said and I had to do the research myself to find the correct family members. That us what family history is about, searching for your family, yourself.0 -
Leon Morse said: The issue is not whether indexers and arbitrators are heroes or villains. There is no question that old records written in an unfamiliar hand, interpreting various ethnic names and sometimes in less than pristine condition are difficult to navigate. The issue is that there are literally thousands of people still alive that know the correct answer and are overwhelmingly eager to set the record straight for the rest of us and for future generations. To ignore this marvelous resource for the want of programming is an absolute disgrace. This project should assume equal importance with adding new records. The records to be added will be around for years to come. Those of us who know the right answer won't.0
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Bernice Mistrot said: To Leon Morse: Amen. Amen. I don't care how the error occurred. Sometimes the original is wrong; sometimes the transcription is wrong; sometimes it's both. I just want to be able to offer an alternate spelling, with my reasons, so that others can find the record.
Ancestry has had this capability for years, and it works great. There are plenty of transcription errors at Ancestry too, but once an addendum (not a correction) has been made, a user can find it under either spelling. If four alternates are submitted, the user can find it under any one of them. I cannot understand why FamilySearch refuses to provide users with the ability to add alternate information.0 -
Leonard McCown said: Indexing is to make research easier no question about it. Much can be prevented by enlarging the handwriting so you can see it better! If Ancestry can do it certainly Family Search and the Church can do it!0
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Patricia Casey said: WELL SAID, LEON!0
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Patricia Casey said: June, I am so happy that you found no errors in your family tree over the years. I too found that to be true in earlier years and research. Also glad that your research was able to resolve any errors you did find. Were you able to change the MIS-information? Those of us with the most complaints have not been able to correct those errors... and recognise the info as errors...but we are thinking of future generations who may want to find their ancestors and hit dead ends because someone today made a SERIOUS mistake in transcribing. I have found my ancestors back to the late 1400"s and had not recognised any mistakes in all that research over the years.... until the last couple of years when the Indexing really got started. Actual documents that I have printed out from this very web site just recent years... do not match up with the transcribed, indexed information of that same document in current indexes on FS!0
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Buddie said: May I add my echo for being able to add alternate readings. I located a census record in Ontario, because I gave up on my name and searched for a known neighbor. My name was spelled by the indexer in a way that it would be nearly impossible to locate.
Adding alternate information is a boon for this type of an indexing error!!
Shirley G0 -
September Amyx said: I've been seeing errors that multiplied in number. I've recently found entire data sets where one indexer mistranscribed every single name. This has to be deliberate, no one can make that many mistakes of reading on one dataset. I think that FS should investigate, but when I called them they promoted the party line- "The researcher will find it." I'm sorry, when it's so badly mispelled that it doesn't match the soundex at all, how are they supposed to find it?! Maybe it's a 'your're not a member of the church' thing for giving that pat answer? Do members get the same response.0
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Mary Susan (Carlson) Scott said: As most of the participants on this thread, I have been frustrated with the mistakes that have come through the extraction and indexing processes. I want to share with you some experiences I had recently which may be encouraging.
Recently I started using the new Family Tree website launched by FamilySearch. It is the website that members of the LDS Church will use regularly to link their families together. It will also be available more and more to genealogists who are not members of the LDS Church.
Experience 1: Correcting Relationships
Last week I had the opportunity to correct the listing of parents for my mother-in-law. She has both biological and adoptive parents. Unfortunately someone also gave her another set of parents (her adoptive father and his second wife, the stepmother). It was wonderful to make the changes and not have to call the help line and/or fret anymore. I was also able to mark the two sets of parents "biological" and "adopted" which was also good.
Experience 2: Correct Names
Today I was able to correct a surname which had been read and transcribed incorrectly.
The surname was from a Dutch family and is actually "Vleisman". The challenge came because the indexer/extractor had read the "V" as though it was the letter "K" (Kleisman). In another case, the indexer/extractor read the "Vl" as though they were one letter "H" (Heisman). Of course Kleisman and Heisman were incorrect.
This family lived for generations in Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands. Their records are on GenLias (www.genlias.nl) and also the provincial archives website (www.allegroningers.nl). In addition I was able to see the actual record on a digital copy on www.familysearch.org.
One of the problems is that the handwritten "V" in the mid-nineteenth century could be written quite fancy. If a person is not familiar with the Dutch handwriting, it really could be mistaken as the letter "K" -- especially if read by someone who might not know better or who was tired.
After I made the correction, I wrote an explanation and also (in a separate step) added the source information with a note/comment from me.
The thrilling part came when I could correct the surname and never see that incorrect surname again!
I wanted to share this with the participants on this thread because there is hope for us. We will have the opportunity to make corrections, additions, and/or comments to our records.
I agree with the suggestion made earlier today or this week -- keep a notebook of necessary corrections. The corrections might also be kept in a genealogy computer program (notes, additional facts and events, etc.).
If you are not a member of the LDS Church, try to find out when the public will start using Family Tree. It is possible that some non-members are using Family Tree now but I am not sure when they will. Maybe the information is available somewhere but I apologize because I am not sure when or how to sign up currently.
It will be a great day when we can ALL make the corrections and other edits we need to make. I know many of you will be anxious until you can work on the new Family Tree website. (Remember it will be on www.FamilySearch.org).
Do not lose heart. There are better days coming soon!0 -
JEAN HARDCASTLE said: When are we going to get some more UK projects - there is another life beyond the USA.0
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Linda Bird said: I was really excited when I heard that they were correcting the major problem with new.familysearch and that you could "correct" inaccurate information that had been submitted over the years from all those 4 generation pedigree and family group sheets that had been submitted over the years. The new program is nice and much easier to navigate but still has not solved the major problem of being allowed to "unlink" your family line and reconnect it using more up-to-date research. I belong to one of the largest families in the church. A MAJOR error was made by a highly respected genealogist in the 1950's. His research has now been totally disproven using both DNA and excellent research by our family organization, but it is still impossible to unlink the bad research and put in the correct names. Yes, it is nice to be able to correct the simple typos from the old records, but all this is pointless if you cannot link your family to the correct ancestors! The myth that the Aldridge Family and the Allred Family are the same group just keeps getting perpetuated over and over. If this only effected just a small group of people, I can understand correcting the misinformation would not be high on the "to do" list, but this effects thousands of faithful members of the church who are just trying to do the best, most accurate job they can in with their genealogy.0
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Linda Bird said: Not sure what the point of the little smiley and frowning faces are. Is it some king of "group therapy?0
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Carol Denehy said: I am a beginning genealogist and a beginning indexer but I have a LOT of experience with very large data bases transcribed by human beings. It is simply impossible to make sure that what *you yourself know* as fact is what is recorded in transcribed records. Having done some indexing, the hand writing is horrible. I've had two people appear in the same batch who I KNEW where talking about the same place in Italy but each spelled it differently. Am I as an indexer tasked with going to a gazetteer and finding the correct name? And correct as of when? The 1880's when these men left it or the 21st century? I've seen lots of mashups of my family name (Hotchkiss) and Ancestry does a pretty good job at finding mispelled variants. I won't point out how many typographical errors were made by the folks railing against typographical errors in the transcriptions! The census folks were really bad with handwriting, as we all are today. Think of how many of us don't even handwrite anything beyond a grocery list these days. As an indexer, I try my very best to get what was written on the documents correct as written. If the information is wrong when put down originally, there's nothing I can do. Names have many variant
spellings so be a little forgiving. Absolute accuracy is impossible.0 -
Rosalie Erekson Stone said: Can you unlink the bad research in FamilyTree by deleting the very first incorrect parental relationships going back in time? For example, if John is the closest ancestor to you who is linked to an incorrect line, I believe you can delete the relationships for John as the son of the incorrect father, and John as the son of the incorrect mother. He will then appear as having no parents. I think you can then enter the correct parents so that John will thereafter be connected to the proper paternal and maternal lines.0
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Tom Huber said: The "official response" is now over two years old.
While major progress has been made with respect to Family Tree in FamilySearch, not being able to correct mistranscribed data in the indexes is really inexcusable and continues to be inexcusable.
As many have said, if ancestry.com can make provisions for at least noting and being able to search on corrections, then there is absolutely no valid reason (especially after two years) why FamilySearch can't implement a system.
If we want to access original records, then the indexes must accurately reflect those records and in one instance that I just looked at, there are two errors in the transcription from the image to the index! And no way to correct those errors!
Even after two years of having this problem recognized? At least give us a progress report!0 -
robertkehrer said: Thomas,
You are right it has been a while.
We've had a number of higher priority things that we needed to work on first. The progress we've made on the Family Tree and other tools has slowed down progress on this feature a bit and it has been noted that user corrections to an index would require changes in multiple of our backend systems so it would take a while.
Here's a progress report.
1) We have this feature on our roadmaps for delivery in the latter half of 2013.
2) We have been testing various designs to make sure the we understand the best way to deliver the feature and meet user needs
3) We have been actively rearchitecting several of our backend systems to accomodate the transfer of multiple assertion data from the front end search client to the back end data bases.
4) We are rearchitecting our systems to enable publishing of individual edited records more efficiently to all the systems that will need access to it.
5) We will begin in the first half of next year to make modifications to the search interface to bring the record details and image viewer together into one screen as a requirement for proper editing of indexed data.
We still have a good bit of wrok in front of us, but this is recognized throughout the organization as a high priority feature to deliver.
-Robert0 -
Shari said: Patricia- I find your criticism of the transcribers particularly harsh after reading your posts because you do not proofread your posts. Either you have a typing problem or a spelling problem -you see, none of us are perfect. I have found several mistakes and I know it is a terrible problem but I also know how incredibly difficult it is to find volunteers. It doesn't get any easier to find volunteers when they have to listen to all of the criticism and they don't feel like their efforts are appreciated. Let us practice a little more understanding toward one another and press toward the real problem and that is the design of the site that doesn't allow for comments or annotations to the records. -Shari C0
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Shari said: The problem is they have people doing the transcriptions that aren't familiar with the area. The simple solution to that is -get familiar with the area! Go look at the census records. See what surnames lived in the area, see what the names of the towns and townships were. There are simple solutions to some of the problems, it's just no one has suggested them! I know about the names and places where my families are from because I haven't just studied my family, I have also studied their neighbors and the towns and townships around them. The cemeteries we visit, we study and photograph other surnames as well, to familiarize ourselves with the area. This helps a lot when you have to transcribe things! I have been working on a cemetery at find a grave using death records here and someone trascribed Letart Township as Setart. There are two places in the county -Letart Township and Letart Falls -a village. Also Letart Falls Cemetery. Also last name Beegle transcribed Buglu. It was just someone really inexperienced doing the transcribing is all. It really does take a lot of practice to read old handwriting quickly and correctly. With less and less people writing now days with the use of computers, the skill of transcribing handwriting is only going to get more difficult. -Shari C.0
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Shari said: I agree whole-heartedly Mary Susan Scott! Very nice comments. -Shari0
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Janet Marie Nazer said: I too have seen mistakes in the spelling of family names. For example, in the 1930 census, for Park City, Montana, several of my mom's siblings' names are misspelled; for example, Lytia was supposed to be Lydia. Even the last name was misspelled from Vogele (or Vogel) to Vogle. Granted, my grandparents were from
Russia, which made it hard for them to speak English. In the 1940 census, my dad's sister's family's last name was misspelled from Pettipiece, to Littipiece and Lethipiece; also, at one point, my dad's last name was misspelled, from Nazer to Nazer. No, I can not go in and make corrections. Darn it!!0 -
Richard Stewart-Dawson said: There is no doubt indexers face difficulties in entering correct information but the major issue is NOT BEING ABLE TO CORRECT THOSE MISTAKES OR OUT A NOTE LISTING CORRECT SPELLING. I found a female ancestor whose name had been misspelled breaking the line as when I searched on the correct name I found a whole lot of her ancestors. Please have a simple function where we can enter a notation or a link to a note regarding this person. How hard is that as an interim measure and and alert for the indexers to go back and correct at a later time when it is possible0
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JEAN HARDCASTLE said: Free BMD have an excellent system for correcting mistakes - if a researcher
informs them re. an error, even a minor one, and presents evidence then they inform the indexer by email and they are able to correct the records - is this solution too simple for Family Search?0 -
Louis Parrella said: I just started looking through FamilySearch and found an error in spelling on one ancestor already. If 3 people looked at the page, and they saw a looping L, they would see that Luigi is not Louigi, and never was, but they don't look at other records on the same page just to study the handwriting. I must also say that Ellis Island is much worse. There's probably 10 different spellings for the same town in Italy, doesn't anyone have a reference list to look at? I guess they just don't care. I share a (illegitimate) relative with Charles Atlas, the body builder, and in Ellis Island, they brag about his being number 1 on the search, but they have the wrong "Angelo Siciliano" (his birth name). I wrote to them about it, but of course they don't want to change it, that would mean they've been wrong all these years!
Just imagine if these people had written the Bible, we would never know if Jesus was related to David or Abraham.0 -
bellringer said: I find errors in dates and places in a family tree for my great-grandparents (not a census transcription error) and it is a crime that I cannot give corrections, or even give alternate suggestions. What's the point of having WRONG information online, and being unable to fix it?0
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Austin guerin said: While transcription errors are extremely possible,but for not having any means to correct your on-line database is hogwash. Fields can be added to allow for comments and/or adjustments. It is just that the LDS doesn't want to do it.
Since Ancestry setup this website in cooperation with the LDS Church, both parties should look at it hard so that corrections can be made by researchers. We know the original documents cannot be changed, but websites and databases can be.0 -
Logan Allred said: Austin & bellringer,
Robert has stated that editing/corrections of the data will be allowed later this year. They are working on it. https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...0
This discussion has been closed.