General Chat

IGP, I am suggesting that the first names should be transcribed to Herberl, Alberl etc, since I was told that they have to type what the enumerator (appeared to) write. That particular enumerator did not cross a lot of his ts and there were people born in Manchesler. If the person who checks when an error is reported and studies the page carefully, they will see that the double t in the name Bettany which was transcribed as Bellany does not look like the double l in the middle of the names William Cullen and William Williams immediately above his name, as they have a loop. A bit of comonsense wouldnt hurt, but I guess that is asking too much, even though the first names are correctly typed, but that is more a case of the transcriber not noticing that they were written like Herberl, etc as he/she was expecting it to be Herbert.

Must go, off out for the day.

Huia.

FreeBMD rules are that we have to type exactly as we see it, and I do that, even when I see a record duplicated exactly - I do it twice as instructed.
If I make a mistake, I am happy to correct it, but recently I felt it was going a little too far.
Only one christian name is written or typed in full, with the initials only of subsequent names. ie, Mary Elizabeth Jane Jones is typed in the index as "Jones......Mary E.J." I recently was asked to correct my entry for a few names. I couldn't see what was wrong for a while until I finally worked out that I had put a space between the initials and typed it as
Mary E. J. instead of Mary E.J. They were asking me to remove the space between the initials because the original index didn't have a space there.
In order to do this, I had to log into FreeBMD and download the page I had created and save it in Notebook, then load it into the BMD system and delete the space; save it again then re upload it to FreeBMD and also log into the co-ordinator in Canada and re-upload to replace their 'wrong' version also. (Everything goes to two places - UK and to one of the co-ordinators in various parts of the world)..
I felt that was a bit much considering that I did put a 'full stop' (period) after each initial.

Well, it is interesting to read the other side of the story, and to read of your problems correcting your 'error' Berona. I agree some images are faint and some writing is hopeless. With regard to faintness, some years ago I got a copy of an image of some ancestors. Today I was looking for them on FMP and could not find them. I tried searching by the folio and page number etc and found that nothing on that page had been transcribed. When I looked at the image it was impossibly faint, unlike the version I have (thank goodness). I just hope I dont strike any more like that.

Huia.

I agree with you Shane. It would be boring if things were too easy to find.

One of my names has an ending that changes all the time, so I mainly search with just the first letters and *. But when you have a name beginning Post transcribed with such variations as Bertanni and Voslans, using first names is the only way.

Perhaps the family was known locally as "Them Piggin' Corbetts.....!"

good one IGP


I remember some years ago trying to help someone on GR to find their family.

I was a bit slow in recognising mis-transcriptions in those days .... but it was on the 3rd evening that I finally decided to take a look at the family with some of the correct names but said to have been born in Somalia. I'd dismissed them on the previous searches



Correct family ......... born on Somerset


The census taker had written Somt, where the t was a superscript.

The transcriber saw it as Som'l


and decided that it was Somalia