Reporting and Correcting Duplicate Places in FamilySearch Places
In FamilySearch Places, the place of worship for St Agnes Church in Bristol, Gloucestershire is duplicated. The duplicates are 3355224 and 11744297. They have identical GPS coordinates. As it's start date of 1886 is more accurate, I believe the 3355224 place is a better place. Can these places be merged? Or one deleted? How is this done? Or who can I share this duplication with? Thank You, David.
Best Answers
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Thanks for the tip. Suggestion submitted. As I shared my email in the suggestion, will I receive feedback or a response about the suggestion?
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@DavidNCraig You should receive a response by email from the Authorities Team but it will probably take a few weeks.
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They will respond in few days, not weeks.
Go to https://www.familysearch.org/en/research/places/?pagenum=1&pagesize=20
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The relevant Help Article may be useful:
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I can't answer that. I don't know if you will be contacted.
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I wholly agree with the highlighting of this issue.
But just for interest's sake and to illustrate the issues that the people maintaining the database have to go through, one of the places is "Bristol St Agnes Church, Gloucestershire, England" and the other is "St Agnes' Church, Bristol, England". I searched in the database on "St. Agnes, Bristol" and only found the latter. But look at the difference in the naming - the latter is a place within "Bristol", but the former is a single placename within the county of Gloucestershire - nothing says it's in Bristol other than the text of the name, which the human eye can interpret but probably not the computer…
So how do FS standardise their church names? I'm not sure I know but it's the sort of issue that they need to think about, and then fix the ones named according to the other standard… Hard work… There is an Alternate Names facility that can help, by the way…
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I've been thinking about these Places issues and wondering whether FamilySearch could be making better use of its resources on the ground. Those on this thread who are LDS, surely there would be church members with local history knowledge and access to local records and to the local archivists of other denominations? Such members perhaps could take responsibility for validating local Places and getting them corrected and duplicates dealt with.
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That won't work. Billions of places many of LDS never heard of, much less few or any of LDS living in those areas.
Secondly, there would be a lot of disputes over the place names. I know because I encountered many who don't believe the places exist.
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Even sorting out the local church information in bigger cities (Bristol being a good example) would help, though. And if someone local took responsibility and was trusted to know the answers, that might help with the arguments.
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My impression @MandyShaw1 is that there already are groups assigned to specific areas - it isn't just the "official" Places team. I have a vague idea (and don't quote me on this!) that there is a group for Canada, eg. But even there, the sheer size of the job is, I suspect, the true impedance, rather than the size of the team.
I also have this horrible suspicion that the total number of genealogists knowledgeable about many places is in the single figures and most of them won't be anywhere near FamilySearch, pushing us back to the current situation.
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Doesn't need to be an expert genealogist though, just someone (maybe not even an LDS member) interested on local history and in getting data right. And I am talking about more localised projects than say 'Canada'. I think I will assess what a local church Place tidying-up project would involve if I did it myself, as a non-LDS Bristol/Bath local (with limited genealogy skills but interested in local history and obsessed with data quality).
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The scale of this is astonishing btw:
My brother took on my late aunt's subscription and has yards and yards of the books and periodicals.
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@MandyShaw1 Has the Society allowed these books to be digitized?
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I have submitted 7 "suggest a new place" since this August post, with 1 response from FamilySearch.
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DavidNCraig
Did you include links showing correct or new places?
Lately they have been slower in responses.
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Yes
Multiple links. Exact GPS coordinates. The associated FamilySearch film with the Parish Church records from the suggested place of worship. My work is in England, so suggesting places of worship for Birth, Marriage & Death events.
I have saved screen shots of each submitted "suggest a place".
The one suggestion that was accepted was a WWI Cemetery in Alexandria, Egypt.
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There's a digital resource here:
plus free downloadable versions of some of the books:
I am not sure how useful any of it is in our context - though it does seem to provide a jurisdiction hierarchy, it doesn't appear to include anything pinpointing geographical locations - but I may well have missed something (this is the first time I have looked at it myself).
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