Trying to fix numerous errors in 1885 FL census, but the work is unmanageable in new editor
I have been working on and off over the past two years trying to repair the index for the 1885 census for Washington County, Florida. Since the switch to the new record viewer/editor, things have really become impossible. Previously, we descendants from these families corrected the names on 30 of 105 pages. Now our changes are somehow relegated to secondary status, the incorrect old names show up on the index, and the corrections are only seen in edit mode. And there seems to be no way to adjust surnames for whole family groups. These people all had 12-15 kids!!!
Also, many names and pages of names are simply missing from the index. I have tried to add them back in, but it is extremely tedious to add each field and then data, and I have yet to find the option to add the field for birthplace (although parents' birthplaces fields are available). Then, when I leave the page, the additions disappear!
I'm sure I'm not authorized to access the database directly, but there must be an easier way! I would be willing to do all the corrections, but not like this. Any suggestions?
Answers
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Copy/pasted to Feedback.
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Unfortunately, there are gremlins in the index editor: "add" doesn't work (as you've discovered), the display of new versus old data is unpredicable and faulty, and sometimes, edits result in disappearing entries instead of the intended corrections. Because of these problems, I have been largely avoiding using the editor for at least the past year. Sometimes, a wrong name bugs me enough to fix just that one thing, and those seem to be OK, but I basically don't dare to make any changes to the structure (family groupings and relationships), because those edits seem to be what trigger disappearances most often.
I have not been alone in the past several years in asking — nay, begging! — for a dedicated Index Editor group where we could tell the engineers directly about all of the problems we encounter, and they in turn could tell us where the process currently stands. Unfortunately, such requests appear to have fallen on deaf ears (or to have gone entirely unseen/unread by anyone in charge, anyway).
Given the lack of communication and continuing serious faults, I think the best we can do is to make use of the Feedback tab (as you've reported doing), and to fall back on our pre-index-correction consolation: the index served its purpose, despite its errors, because we found the record.
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Thanks for your response. I also wish I could communicate directly with the database engineers, and hope my feedback can be effective.
While it's true "we found the record," many of the names are so badly misspelled that other researchers may never find theirs. 😕
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According to one thread on the Editor, some issues may have been recently repaired. Ever hopeful, I am, for further progress. See the comment of DavidLeeLambert on 24 June in this long thread:
I was unable to fix several errors I accessed in the last few days.
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Here's my 2 penn'orth of evidence.
search: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.surname=eddy&q.surname.exact=on&f.collectionId=1803765
searchDate: 2023-11-01
arkId: …familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XH2V-K3Y
roleInRecord: Principal
fullName: Thomas I Eddy
residenceDate: 1810
residencePlaceText: Kinderhook, Columbia, New York, United StatesThis record was present in this record search on 1st November 2023, but has been absent ever since I changed the gentleman's indexed middle initial from I to J. The image's indexed data no longer shows Thomas Eddy at all.
The record comes up as 'padlocked' (restricted), which has been the case ever since I made my metadata change. The rights on this record show as …familysearch.org/records/recordPermissions/CdsPrmNoAccess.
Worryingly, the image's displayed indexed data change history stops in 2022 despite my 2023 update (hopefully this is just part of the 'rights' thing).
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Thank you for your feedback. We appreciate your input. As others have mentioned, the most effective way to report errors of this nature is through the feedback tab, which directs your concerns straight to our engineering team. Please rest assured that your feedback is being heard and addressed as they are able, and remember that many of these issues are challenging and complex to resolve. Although they hear the feedback, the engineers may not always have the ability to respond individually. If you wish to discuss this topic further with others, the Community is the ideal platform for such discussions.
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I have added my evidence as feedback against the image I mentioned.
Given the number of occurrences and the months that have elapsed I would hope the engineers are by now pretty clear on the symptoms and root cause and on how to identify affected image index data.
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MandyShaw1 : "This record was present in this record search on 1st November 2023, but has been absent ever since I changed"
Yes, this has happened to me many times. In fact, all those names that are missing may be names I edited in the past! 😀
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Am I in FamilySearch jail, or why are my comments not posting? Mercury retrograde?
I've had enough. I'm going to watch Bridgerton.
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The Community software decides in its infinite wisdom that some posts (and some edits) require mod approval. It'll probably appear shortly.
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I have seen this numerous times, and now I am wondering if all those names missing from indexes are records that have been edited since the switch.
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@Stacey Cracker4Life Likely. We've been noticing the problem for many months.
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Yes, yet more instances of an apparently completely repeatable bug causing data corruption, which offends my data geek brain. I can't see that reporting a single instance to the engineers can do much, unless it prioritises that one's data being fixed? Has anyone seen that happen?
What I don't for the life of me understand is why the index editor wasn't switched off immediately when this first surfaced, until the editor had been corrected (am I right that that correction has at last happened now?)
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@MandyShaw1 If your question is meant to be "Am I right that the index editor has been turned off?" Not to my knowledge. It's not always available on some records, but it is still active/available/wreaking havoc.
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Sorry Aine, no, I meant has the bug in the index editor now been fixed, so that no further new data corruption occurs? I suspect the answer is no, not yet, from what you have just said.
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Some folks have reported being able to make corrections and still access the index afterward. So, perhaps, baby steps.
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@MandyShaw1, I haven't seen recent evidence of the gremlin — but neither have I seen any evidence (recent or otherwise) of its elimination, nor any report of word from the programmers.
Index corrections were already causing various problems a year ago this April, and I posted about some record disappearances back in July of last year. (As I recall, I first started seeing such reports a few weeks earlier, so right around a full year ago now.)
The nonfunctional "add" process was a somewhat later development; I posted about that last November.
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Earlier today, I checked an index that I edited in early February. That index is still MIA and the record still shows the lock icon with the restricted access message.
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I also went back and looked at the 40 or so Census pages I have messed up over the past year by trying to group families. (I can't check the 20 or so that I messed up before I realized I was messing them up and started saving the links.) None of the missing people has been restored, so I see no evidence that the messed up pages have been restored in any way.
As I have stated before, I have no idea how the "developers" could globally find and magically restore all of the missing people from the messed up indexes. In some cases, only some of the people are missing from a page. In other cases, entire pages of people are missing.
There have been assurances that all of these pages eventually will be restored, so I have continued to try to group families. It usually works, but some people/families continue to disappear, so the underlying problem with the editor itself does not seem to be fixed—in addition to the problem of all of the pages previously messed up by the editor not being restored (could it be thousands or tens of thousands of messed up pages at this point?).
I have also encountered failures to find people in census records with searches, even though I know they exist there based on searching for them and seeing them in the same censuses on Ancestry.com. Then, when I browse through the FamilySearch versions of the pages, the index pages are blank—suggesting that somebody else might have tried to group families or fix other issues—only to have the page disappear and be unavailable for others to find sources in their searches.
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The complete silence from the engineers on this major issue is concerning. Would it really hurt someone to write a couple of paragraphs describing FS' approach to fixing this problem and to correcting the considerable data corruption it has caused, and subsequently to keep us up to date with progress? The longer this drifts, the more important communication becomes.
I have cut and pasted this comment into Feedback.
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I just visited that index I edited in early February (mentioned above). It was still locked in late June.
It's still locked, but NOW the edit I made has disappeared!
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This raises another question I have been mulling. Even if the messed up indexed pages can somehow all be magically identified among all of the pages that are not messed up. And, even if there is some way to restore all of the indexed entries that have disappeared from those pages, what if people had made edits to entries on those pages before they disappeared? Will all of those edits still exist, or will there have to be a reversion to the original indexing and all changes lost? (I am not sure I am using the correct terminology to describe all of this.)
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Agreed. I have reported several disappearing entries/pages with the Feedback button, but this has been going on for over a year now with only rumors about what is being done. I have been very impressed by FamilySearch Family Tree, but this particular issue is very frustrating. I think they need to stop adding new stuff for a month and focus all efforts on fixing this.
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I completely agree.
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