need to remove spurious individual & reference

KathrynSBlack

There is an entry for James Snoad (KLWJ-L9K) based on a christening in Graveney, Kent. However, when the parish register images are examined the entry for that date (24 July 1868) is for Jane, not James. Clearly the indexers read it wrong and now there's wrong information out there. There is a need for a utility to correct bad indexing and the phantom entries that are generated from them.

Paul W

Unfortunately, nothing can be done about such errors once the batch has been indexed and published.

I suggest you change the details on KLWJ-L9K (sex to female and first name to Jane) and merge this ID with any existing one for JANE Snoad. Then add the christening source to Jane's ID, together with the birth registration record for this Jane Snoad. Both sources are at https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?treeref=KLWJ-L9K&q.givenName=Ja*&q.givenName.exact=on&q.surname=Snoad&q.surname.exact=on&q.birthLikePlace=kent&q.birthLikePlace.exact=on&q.birthLikeDate.from=1868&q.birthLikeDate.to=1868&count=20&offset=0&m.defaultFacets=on&m.queryRequireDefault=on&m.facetNestCollectionInCategory=on and have not yet been attached to any individual.

Finally, make sure you add a note to the source in the name of James Snoad, giving evidence the christening record is for Jane Snoad - for which the other source clearly provides back-up. (Graveney being part of Faversham Registration District in 1868 - see https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/districts/faversham.html)

By the way, many other FamilySearch users (including me!) share your feelings regarding corrections to incorrectly indexed records, but, at present, this issue can only be addressed if there is an attached image to the FamilySearch record, which clearly is not the case in this example.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Oh, James versus Jane is nothing.

When the baptism of my spouse's great-grandmother's sister-in-law was indexed, many decades ago, by some well-meaning but utterly clueless volunteers, they ignored the (clearly-written) name of her father, performed a sex change to create a father out of her mother, and then created a mother out of her father's religion and occupation.

Being female, this totally-spurious index entry was of course turned into one of those little family twiglets that a previous FS system created. (How and why index entries were turned into profiles has been filed under "LDS stuff I don't need to understand". In my experience, the vast majority of these twiglets are based on a baptism that was indexed as female, but this may not be true in all parts of the world.)

Not quite a decade ago, when the current Family Tree began, all of these index-based legacy profiles were imported, despite the fact that they created thousands upon thousands of duplicates, especially in parts of the world (like England) where the same event was often indexed many times, due to multiple filmings of multiple copies of the registers.

As of a couple of years ago, some indexes on Family Search can be corrected to some degree. (You generally can't correct sexes or relationships, and there is no provision for adding or removing fields or records.) However, the index-based detritus in Family Tree is unaffected by such corrections: the profiles were created decades ago, and they reflect the original indexing, letter for letter. The two systems (Records and Tree) are unconnected, except by source attachments performed by users like you and me. (Unsurprisingly, the hinting system is pretty good at finding the verbatim matches that the tree twiglets are based on, but hints are yet a third separate system, only tenuously connecting the other two.)

So what it all boils down to is that yes, it would be nice if we could fix all of the messes created by erroneous indexing, all at once, but realistically, it will never happen. (I'd be happy if all of the imported-and-untouched-since profiles could be found and deleted, but I don't expect that to ever happen, either.)