Records being placed in the wrong county in FamilySearch
I do a lot of historical research of records in and around Wyandotte, Wayne County, Michigan, which is located in Michigan's lower peninsula in the state's largest county. I have recently discovered that many records added to FamilySearch for Wyandotte, Wayne County, Michigan are incorrectly being attributed to Wyandotte, Houghton, Michigan, a very small community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was surprised t learn that a state would allow two cities to have the same name. I envision that what is happening is that when a record for Wyandotte, Michigan is being added a dropdown menu appears with both Wyandottes being listed. Since Wyandotte, Houghton County, Michigan comes first alphabetically in a dropdown, some are quickly selecting it instead of scrolling down and selecting Wyandotte, Wayne County. Michigan. This will cause headaches for both current and future genealogists and family historians. How do we go about both preventing this error in future records, and correcting records already created that incorrectly show Wyandotte, Houghton County, Michigan for a Wyandotte, Wayne County, Michigan record?
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We understand that this would be frustrating. To help us investiage this and identify the scope of the corrections needed, would you please add some film numbers to your post? Is it a particular collection such as a census? If so, which census? Thank you.
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Thank you for the quick response. I have only been researching death certificates and obituaries for now, but have encountered many occurrences. Here is one example:
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Thank you. That DGS number takes us to the collection of MANY films. The ones we have investigated so far, all have some records (100-300) indexed in the wrong county, as you pointed out.
This has forwarded to engineering to resolve the issue.
We cannot predict how long it will take to have them all corrected. We appreciate your patience and again thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Happy ancestor hunting!
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Thank you for your quick replies and for investigating this issue.
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This type of indexing error happens A LOT, and in other counties/states. I encounter it often and when I do, a town or county in a different STATE is chosen by the indexer. Or a county with the same name as the town is randomly chosen or vise versa - like Franklin County, VA for Franklin, Pendleton County, WV. Clearly, some indexers are not paying attention to the name of the record group they're entering. I see records from a county in Virginia indexed as a town in Colorado. It is very easy to make an error when indexing, even accidently with a not-quite-perfect click of the mouse. However, I only do work on FamilySearch intermittently yet encounter this issue frequently.
Who should I email when encountering these indexing errors?
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@ElJune, 99.99% of the time on FamilySearch, those aren't indexing errors. The indexing interface does not have a drop-down for selecting a place -- or it didn't, the last time I worked on a project that included a placename field. Granted, that was a while ago, which just proves my point from a different direction.
Instead, such "same-named place" errors are almost always to be blamed on auto-standardization. In order to change search methodologies for places (and dates), FamilySearch needed to associate all of its indexed location fields with entries in the Places database. They used an automated process to do that, and unfortunately, that process Got It Wrong more often than not. Even more unfortunately, FamilySearch resolutely continues to deny the vast scope of the problem, and expects to fix the errors one at a time, based on user reports here in the Community.
You can recognize an auto-standardization error on the index entry's detail page (the one with the person's name and the collection title in a big black header bar) by the presence of two location fields. One of them will be labeled "(Original)", and is the text that was actually indexed (or added to the index in pre- or post-processing, the more common scenario). The other one is the location in the database that the computer chose to go with that text.
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FamilySearch is working towards allowing users to improve record data. (See this comment.)
In the mean time, you can report record errors here in Community in the "Search" category. Please title your post with a format such as "Report - wrong place" depending on the error. Include a link to the record so that we can see exactly where the problem is. Place name errors such as you are describing are looked at on a case by case basis.
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Thanks for this thread. Now I know how to report all of the many, MANY, mis-standardized records I encounter in Tennessee, where District 5 (or 9 or 14 or whatever), some county, Tennessee, is automatically standardized to District Whatever in Grainger County, TN. It's far too many to correct or report manually, but I'll create a list of badly-standardized collections and submit a report.
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