Location Error Report- Staffordshire Burials
@SerraNola, I believe that for this record and many others (another example)
St. Peter, Wolverhampton, Stafford, England
became
St Peter's Church, Marchington, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
Best Answer
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@GFre @Adrian Bruce1 From what I can tell looking at titles and opening pages of the books that were filmed, the records are identified as the parish of St. Paul. I didn't find the name of a church, but the records creator is shown as "Church of England, St. Peter's Church, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire". In the original indexing, the event place is St. Peter, Wolverhampton, Stafford, England—as mentioned. However, In the standardized place name the parish comes after the town/city name, as one jurisdiction: Wolverhampton St. Paul, Staffordshire. This accords with how they are shown in England Jurisdictions 1851:
Obviously, the system couldn't find a good match so it chose the name of a church in Marchington parish. Better jurisdiction field matching is being addressed by engineers, but throwing the names of churches and parishes into the mix makes it all the more difficult.
As always, thanks for good analysis and for bringing the issue to our attention.
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Answers
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Yuk. If I look in the Standard Placenames, then Wolverhampton has two churches called St. Peter - or rather, variations thereon.
St Peter's Collegiate Church, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
and
St Peter and St Pauls' Church, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom
It's not totally clear from the name "St. Peter, Wolverhampton, Stafford, England" which one of the two it should be mapped onto. Personally I'd make a strong guess that it's the Collegiate Church but I know what a Collegiate Church is, and how they tend to be referred to. So that'll be easy to code won't it? (Whimsicality OFF)
There is also the non-trivial point that "Wolverhampton, Stafford" could be a suburb of the City of Stafford, instead of a town in the county of Staffordshire. Arguably that should have gone into processing as "St. Peter, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England". Which still doesn't help with deciding whether it's the Collegiate church or not.
@SerraNola - a bit of thinking needed from the engineers on this one, I fear!
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I should have clicked through to the Standard Placename entry for "St Peter and St Pauls' Church, Wolverhampton" - it says there that
"St Peter and St Paul Church is a Roman Catholic Parish church in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England."
Since I have cross checked @GFre's problem records with their images on FindMyPast, I can recognise that they are Church of England registers and that therefore that his St. Peter's must be the (Church of England) Collegiate Church, not the Roman Catholic "St. P & P".
But that's me doing manual research and I'm therefore still unclear what algorithms should be used to map "St. Peter, Wolverhampton, Stafford, England" to "St Peter's Collegiate Church, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom" rather than "St Peter and St Pauls' Church, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom"
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