Dublin overrun with people from Westmeath 1901 Ireland census
Location for many peeps in the 1901 census that live on a "street" - location has been changed from Dublin to "Street, Granard, County Westmeath, Ireland" Most recent example, search William McMahon, 1901 Ireland Census, put Dublin in the "add life event" place box.....entries 9 - 10 - and 11, scrolling down, all have "Street, Granard, County Westmeath, Ireland" when they are actually in County Dublin. This is just one example I found today, I have seen it before but only thought to post it here today. (since other issues have been fixed from this forum :) )
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@dar barber Thank you for reporting the inaccurate place showing on the 1901 census. I have reported it to engineers for correction. We are not able to predict how long it will take for the error to be corrected.
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@dar barber Can you post a URL so that @N Tychonievich has the details to report to the engineers of a place name standardization error?
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Any update on this one? Or an indication of where it is in the queue to get fixed? Or a forecast on when it will be addressed?
Getting this addressed would be the removal of a serious, high volume error source.
It's a pretty fundamental error that occurs across all Irish census records that relate to people in an urban environment where a street name is included. The place name in this high volume of cases is incorrectly set to the town of Street, County Westmeath, rather than the street name of the correct town as shown in the census.
I have corrected this error innumerable times in the family tree. It causes great confusion to people not intimate with Irish geography.
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For your information:
While I've never dealt with Irish urban census records, so can't confirm what @John Curran says from personal experience, I am not at all surprised. My first thoughts are that this has everything to do with the way that the Irish 1901 and 1911 censuses are indexed. The geographic part is comprised of the three elements:
Townland/Street, DED, County
Presumably the index also contains "Ireland" though whether that's on the file provided to FS or appended by FS, I've no idea.
DED stands for "District Electoral Division"
Townland/Street contains the name of the townland if it's a rural area, or the name of the street if it's an urban area.
For urban areas, it's clear that the street will never appear in the FS Standard Places and thus auto-standardisation can get nothing useful from that element.
So far as I know "District Electoral Division" appears in no other context on Irish records - though I'm open to correction on that. At any rate, it's my impression that DEDs aren't in the FS Standard Places - although in the usual way of things, many of them are named after towns or villages which do appear.
So if you get, on the Irish census indexes, an index value like
Great Clarence Street, South Dock, Dublin, Ireland
then the "Great Clarence Street, South Dock" isn't a lot of use and it seems pot luck (to me) whether it picks up the parish of Street in County Westmeath or what.
In all honesty, I have no immediate suggestion on how to tweak things - I'm simply recording this for the benefit of anyone reading this thread in the hope that they may be better informed. (All comments and corrections welcome).
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I can't help with a projected fix date. As N Tychonievich said in the original discussion
We are not able to predict how long it will take for the error to be corrected.
I just checked instances that I reported in February 2023 and July 2023, in the US 1950 census, and both have been corrected. Thanks @N Tychonievich.
One I reported in the 1901 Irish census, in late July 2023, has not yet been corrected.
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In response to AdrianBruce1, No one expects the street names to appear as standardized place names. The problem here is that for MANY Irish census records the PLACE/County has been changed from one county to another. In the above example DUBLIN county records have been standardized to WESTMEATH county.
An example in the USA would be that you are searching for SMITH's in New York and you get all your results for SMITH in Pennsylvania. That would certainly be annoying! And that is what has happened here. When you search for people in DUBLIN they don't show because of the standardization to WESTMEATH.
Street names in Irish records are very important because of the commonality of many surnames. Again, no one expects them to be standardized, it would just be nice to get the counties corrected so that searching is easier.
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@dar barber said: "No one expects the street names to appear as standardized place names"
No indeed. I'm simply trying to explain at least part of what's going on. My suggestion is that the auto-standardisation algorithm doesn't know that part 1 of that "place" is a street. Therefore it looks at the whole thing - and "Great Clarence Street" is a part match to several parishes called "Street".
I would have hoped that "Great Clarence Street, South Dock, Dublin" would also be a match to "Dublin" and I assume that it is - but for some reason the Street in Westmeath seems to be a "bigger" match than the Dublin in Dublin. I get a distinct feeling that the order of the bits in the "place" has less importance than we might imagine. This may be important - putting the ridiculous example of "Ireland, Tipperary, France" into the FS Placenames enquiry gets to the Irish county / town / parish of Tipperary, not to anywhere in France - even though the last element is France.
As I say - I'm just trying to explain a few things in the hope that someone who understands the algorithms might see a way to tweak things.
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@dar barber Sorry, I have no update. The report was made and is still open. I have no way to see where it is in queue for correction. Basically, I just throw it over the fence to the group that fixes things and don't hear back until an issue is closed.
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@N Tychonievich could you possibly ask for an update?
I would assume that there is some sort of a queue of stored changes to be implemented at a future release.
You, as a moderator, should have a reasonable expectation to get a status on requests you have submitted.
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@John Curran Please see the post directly above yours. We do not have a way of finding out where it is in the queue or when it will taken care of. That is out of our reach. Please have patience. @N Tychonievich is great at getting back when answers are provided.
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@Maile L thank you for your comment. I certainly had no intention of expressing any form of impatience and I am regretful if my comments have come across as such.
My desire is simply to grow the utilization of this Irish Research interest group and benefit all parties. Activity level in this group has fallen dramatically over the past few years from a former state of healthy daily activity to what it is today, i.e. there being almost no posts at all.
I am certain that as moderators, you and @N Tychonievich would share my goal of seeing future healthy levels of activity as a positive thing.
The problem being discussed, the incorrect reading of place names, is regarded as a significant problem that is confusing large numbers of users who are not familiar with the geography of Ireland. When they appropriately report the system error, they have a reasonable expectation to have their concerns taken seriously, and to get updates on status.
Here I believe @N Tychonievich did see the scale of the problem and appropriately reported the issue to those who have the capability of scheduling a resolution.
Asking for an update on the progress of the issue resolution is not unreasonable. Perhaps that update is merely that resolution is not yet planned but will be considered for potential inclusion in a release within a one-year timeframe.
I know from experience that keeping people updated encourages engagement.
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