County fixing
i was looking for Wihlemina and her father Friedrich Miller who is listed on the line above her. The location for both are indexed as Salem, Washtenaw, Michigan . They should be indexed for the less common Salem in Allegan County.
"Michigan Deaths and Burials, 1800-1995", database, FamilySearch(https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:2:9MKP-FS2 : 23 February 2021), Entry for Wilhemina Goodman, 1900.
Is there a way to get this fixed?
Answers
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This is an auto-standardization error. The index simply has "Salem, Michigan, United States".
It also illustrates why a bot is never going to achieve anything other than serious data corruption when it tries to assign locations based on text: sometimes, that text is ambiguous and no location can be assigned except by individualized research. Such detailed research is not the index's job, and the search algorithms cannot be made to rely on it.
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Thank you for posting your question here in Community.
You can edit incorrectly indexed names, dates, and places on some record collections. Editable fields can vary based on the location and language of the user, and any restrictions associated with the collection.
Please refer to the following article from the Help Center here in Community for how to report and how to edit certain fields in a record.
You can also suggest an update to a place name in FamilySearch. Here is how to do that.
Best of success to you in your family history. Please let us know if we can help you further with this or new questions you might have.
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@MDRMT The record in question cannot be edited because the image is not available. This is NOT an indexing error, as @Julia Szent-Györgyi explained in her earlier comment.
This is one - of many - that needs to be escalated to engineers for correction.
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This is actually a legacy collection so additions and corrections will not be made. For further information about the record, please check the WIKI article:
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@CraigWArmstrong We're not talking about a change/addition/correction to a legacy collection.
We are talking about the inaccurate display in search results caused by the placename standardization algorithm.
@N Tychonievich please and thank you.
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the first page on the film says Allegan county, any reference to Salem for that particular film should be Salem, Allegan.
salem, allegan is 150 miles away from salem, washtenaw
on ambiguous names it is up to the user to figute it out, but when it specifically says salem, washtenaw it is veyr misleading
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@MDRMT and @CraigWArmstrong , please thoroughly study this post: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/125985/auto-standardization and all its comments so that you can better understand the problem reported in the original post here and give better answers when this type of problem comes up again. And it will.
This is an example where the Death Place (Original) is correct but incomplete and the auto-standardization routine that created the Death Place bungled the "improvement".
Editing the place name is not the answer. A computer routine corrupted millions of place names in a few minutes. For users to correct these one by one back to what was originally in the index will take years. They need to be corrected in bulk. Also, editing does not remove the incorrectly applied auto-standardized version, it only adds to it.
Many of these place names, such as this one, cannot be edited anyway because of the collections they are in. Again, a bulk routine needs to be created and used to reverse the change to these corrupted place names.
Another problem with simply editing is that a lot of these errors are not actually on the record at all but only appear in the Hints and in the Search results view of the records.
And finally, editing is not possible when the correctly indexed place name is something that will never be in the Places database and therefore will never have a standardized version because it is something like a street name. When we edit, we can only save standardized names.
@vickyg2003 , we have been asked by moderators who are familiar with this problem to report each of these as we find them under the Search category here in Communities. They need to be reported exactly as you did with an example record, description of the problem, and the needed correction. I do hope your post here will be forwarded on to the team that is working on correcting these.
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@vickyg2003, It appears that you have found yet another auto-standardization error. I certainly hope that you will read the comments by @Gordon Collett; he has provide an excellent discussion that pertains to the problem that you have found.
We are grateful that you have made us aware of this problem with the the Michigan Deaths and Burials, 1800-1995 collection. The engineers are working on these auto-standardization errors, but, apparently, must do so collection by collection - thus the need to report every instance of the problem.
I will move this issue into the queue for the engineers' review and resolution. Unfortunately, we are not able to indicate when the the problem will be fixed.
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When working with common names I really don't want to be looking 100's of miles out the area so when I see a county outside my search area I typically ignore the area. Especially since you can't do EXACT on a date.
The auto-standardization really does a disservice to rural Michigan. The place names are not unique in Michigan.
Here are just a few of the duplicate townships and I only worked my way up to the Bs.
3 Adams Townships, 2 Aetna Townships, 2 Arcadia Townships, 2 Austin Townships, 2 Baldwin Townships, 2 Bear Lake Townships, 2 Berlin Townships, 3 Bingham Townships, 2 Blue Lake Townships, and 2 Brady Townships.
We send mail as a Rural Route.
And its not just townships there are city, township and county conflicts too.
Schoolcraft is a villiage, and a township in Kalamazoo county, a Township in Houghton County, and a County in the UP.
Troy is a city in Oakland County, and a Township in Newaygo County.
I have found the standardized locations very misleading.
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Michigan Obituary Collection
Holland is being standardized to the Netherlands. Holland is a major city in SW Michigan.
So Grandma is now born in Salem, Washtenaw, Michigan instead of Salem, Allegan, Michigan and died in the Netherlands!
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