Race and ethnicity indexed in error

LegacyUser

Paul said: I believe this issue has been raised previously - if so, the problem has certainly not been dealt with. Not only is the "Ethnicity" incorrect in this indexed source, but neither this, nor race, would have been recorded in the original record. I cannot find any connection to the USA for this person and his family, so there are serious indexing problems here, which I expect are likely to apply to many other records from this batch.

LegacyUser

Brian Jensen said: Paul,
Good questions. I've reached out to engineers on the Records team to help answer these questions.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: Information fabricated by FamilySearch appeared some years ago in some records of the British in India when some of the persons were classified as "white". If you compare those records with images now available on Findmypast it will be seen that there was no field on the record for race, so the classification "white" was completely made up.

I thought the idea of indexing was to transcribe what was shown on the record, not to fabricate information.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thank you, Brian.

LegacyUser

Juli said: I doubt anybody purposely fabricated anything here. This looks to me like a database transfer error: there was some data in the indexing, probably for housekeeping/tracking, that was erroneously associated with database fields that exist in other indexes on FS. Basically, a semi-automated process went wrong, and nobody caught it pre-publication.

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: As far as I am aware, the incorrect indexing in the India records was never fixed up. I see my post advising this problem was dated June 14, 2010, TEN YEARS ago, with one response from FamilySearch saying "we will contact the project manager over this collection and see if we can't track down an answer for you"
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...
(The link to the record within that post no longer works, so I can't check the current information in the indexed record).