Correct or Dismiss?
What should we be doing? What are people doing?
I recently started my periodic project of opening the seven generation fan chart (for me or my wife depending on the year. This time it is for her) and scanning through all the people showing on it and their children looking for errors and bad merges to correct, hints to attach, redundant data that has been introduced that can be removed, and, this time, clearing quality check flags.
I just ran across the flag, "Theodor Einarsen, "Norway, Church Books, 1797-1958" has a date of 1873 for birth, which is different from 26 April 1881."
Going to the index and image viewer, I see that the indexer's eyes got off-kilter and two thirds of the way down the list of births starting putting in birth dates for the parents from the wrong line. Fortunately those were the last column in the register so that is all that is wrong.
I have three choices:
- Dismiss the error flag with a reason of "Indexing Error."
- Correct the birth dates for Theodor and his wife.
- Correct all 16 incorrect birth dates.
What is FamilySearch hoping we will do? What are most people doing?
This isn't the worst I've run across. I should have recorded where I found this but didn't and now I can't find it again. It was while checking on something for someone else. Here the problem was in parish marriage records. Usually this particular type would list the fathers' names in one column and the two witnesses in the next column. But this time, there was no column for the fathers of the couple at all, just the witnesses. So there are many pages where these witnesses were indexed as the father of the bride or groom. I did delete them from the index for the one couple I was looking at but did not carry on and delete all the incorrect fathers from the dozens of pages in the register. What do we do with such extensive problems?
(I'm now so out of the flow of what I was intending to do this morning that I will take option 3 above.)
Commenti
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When I can, I've been trying to update the indexing errors. I'll admit, I've been a bit hit-and-miss with that work because some days the index editor is just too balky for words. And, many of the records I have been working with are restricted to view at an AL or FSC; editing has to wait until the next time I go. Or, in some cases, the edit option is not available for those restricted records.
And, it takes ~24 hours for the system to update and reflect the edit. I edited one yesterday morning. I checked it early this morning, but it had not yet updated. Perhaps the automated systems also take the weekend off? I'll check it again later this evening.2 -
I may have a reasonable amount of experience working on profiles in FS FamilyTree, but I don't think I've ever touched an Index because of the horror stories I read in this community. Yes, sometimes it works - but sometimes it doesn't and I have no wish to invoke some unpredictable error that might make things worse. Hence, I leave well alone and choose option 1 - dismiss it as an index error.
That, IIRC, is exactly what I did recently with a 1911 England & Wales census record.
On the paper document - the head of household was surnamed "Lofkin". Then…
His, ahem, "housekeeper", was surnamed "McManus". Then…
His children were under his surname of "Lofkin".
The index incorrectly had "McManus" for housekeeper and all children. But the children already had profiles under the correct name Lofkin.
IIRC the checker called out the discrepancy between McManus on the 1911 and Lofkin on the profiles. I dismissed that, put a fairly restrained note on the "Describe the Record" for the attached sources explaining the indexing issue and left the (incorrect) indexes well alone. Discretion is the better part of valour.
(Weirdly, the incorrect index for the 1911 comes from FindMyPast where the index is correct…)
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Of course, I now realise that since the index comes from FindMyPast, then I can't correct it in FS, so my only option is #1.
There must be a lot of indexes where #1 is therefore the only option.
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Thank you all for the input! You are rockstars. Passing this along.
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