Peter_uk_can
24-03-2008, 07:51 PM
I know that many of us knock the quality of some transcriptions and is there any wonder ....
My own side of the family was well researched many years back, when we would trawl through huge dusty volumes and request census copies so I have not used "Alchemy.com" to revist these...... that is until this last weekend.
I received an e-mail from a "new" relative who had found my name via Google.
They could not understand why my great grandfather and family were missing from the 1901 census.
I was tempted to send back a reply in the vein "they can't be missing because I have a copy in my files. In fact I have copies of census's with all the family going back to 1841." but played a hunch and logged into the much loved website. I keyed in the surname, selected 1901 and hit "search".
To my surprise, the family have vanished... I tried a few variations and then went for the given names of the head and his spouse. If like magic they appeared in the list, however the surname was *****jann.
So I hit the "view original" and straight away could see the problem.
Henry Charles ****** Jnr was transcribed as Henry Charles *******jann.
I spent several hours going over all the various census returns, of the 36 that I looked at, 19 of them had transcription errors.
Now ,I know, and I know that many folk know, that the internal search mechanism of our beloved "Alchemy.com" uses the words in the transcriptions and not the text of the original documents. However I am sure that this may not be obvious to those just starting out.
This last weekend, I found ancestors from Guernsey who were listed as been born in Germany. The town of St Helier written as Sheila. Abbreviation Jnr that appears as the surname "Jann" and Bellavista transcribed as Brickesta.
So.. if there is a moral, then it has to be. If you cannot find any justifiable reason why somemone is missing, try different approaches. such as combinations of given names combined with the area they might have lived in. Don't stick with the exact spelling and perhaps go back to where they were last seen and run a search using their previous neighbors, in fact get imaginative and don't assume that the only answer is that they were taken by aliens.
Now who the heck was "Piliteas Hukiel" ??, because I can't read it any better myself....;)
My own side of the family was well researched many years back, when we would trawl through huge dusty volumes and request census copies so I have not used "Alchemy.com" to revist these...... that is until this last weekend.
I received an e-mail from a "new" relative who had found my name via Google.
They could not understand why my great grandfather and family were missing from the 1901 census.
I was tempted to send back a reply in the vein "they can't be missing because I have a copy in my files. In fact I have copies of census's with all the family going back to 1841." but played a hunch and logged into the much loved website. I keyed in the surname, selected 1901 and hit "search".
To my surprise, the family have vanished... I tried a few variations and then went for the given names of the head and his spouse. If like magic they appeared in the list, however the surname was *****jann.
So I hit the "view original" and straight away could see the problem.
Henry Charles ****** Jnr was transcribed as Henry Charles *******jann.
I spent several hours going over all the various census returns, of the 36 that I looked at, 19 of them had transcription errors.
Now ,I know, and I know that many folk know, that the internal search mechanism of our beloved "Alchemy.com" uses the words in the transcriptions and not the text of the original documents. However I am sure that this may not be obvious to those just starting out.
This last weekend, I found ancestors from Guernsey who were listed as been born in Germany. The town of St Helier written as Sheila. Abbreviation Jnr that appears as the surname "Jann" and Bellavista transcribed as Brickesta.
So.. if there is a moral, then it has to be. If you cannot find any justifiable reason why somemone is missing, try different approaches. such as combinations of given names combined with the area they might have lived in. Don't stick with the exact spelling and perhaps go back to where they were last seen and run a search using their previous neighbors, in fact get imaginative and don't assume that the only answer is that they were taken by aliens.
Now who the heck was "Piliteas Hukiel" ??, because I can't read it any better myself....;)