I don't have a clue where to post this weirdness. FYI

carolyocom1

Margaret Wilson

United States Census, 1840

Name:Margaret Wilson • 

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Event Date:1840 • 

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Event Place:Posey, San Juan, Washington, United States • 

[This is totally wrong. It's Posey, Clay, Indiana. Year: 1840; Census Place: Posey, Clay, Indiana; Roll: 76; Page: 340; Family History Library Film: 0007722

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Event Place (Original):Posey

Event Type:Census

Gordon Collett

This type of problem has been posted many times. FamilySearch is well aware of the issue but they have not said much about how or when these might be fixed. This problem occurs when the Event Place (Original) is incomplete. They ran some type of automatic standardization routine which appears basically to have taken that original index place name and just put whatever came up first in the list of possible standards.

You can see how this went awry by trying this in Family Tree. If you go there and in any place name field type in Posey, you will see this:

The drop down menu has 20 possibilities. They routine they used always takes the first one. (Posey in Clay county is number 14).

This automated routine really made a mess of some of the databases. We can only hope they can come up with a way to fix all these. I'll be keeping this debacle in mind to use as an example whenever someone posts a request along the lines of "Can't they just write a little routine to clean up...."

carolyocom1

Thank you, Gordon!