The joy of correcting mistranscriptions

[Jill on the A272]

I've been very busy lately now we are able to submit corrections to names and places of birth on Ancestry. Some of the original enumerators' handwriting is appalling but some of the transcriptions are just careless, while others just need local knowledge to supply the correct birthplace when they aer indistinct.

I've only just noticed that the surname correction now has the facilty to correct all members of ths houshold in one go.

[Darksecretz]

ooooooooooohhhhhhh Jill that will save alot of time... i also like the fact that with the new layout you can see who else has saved that record, and contact them...

lots more connections :smilee:

[Olde Crone Holden]

I've made 52 corrections this week - I know this cos I've just received 52 emails from Ancestry thanking me, lol!

OC

[dicole]

Today I have been at the NSW FH societies conference, and listened to a very interesting talk by the man from ancestry.com.au.

He explained that the transcribers in China India and also Africa, just transcibe by character recognition, which is sometimes difficult, as we all know. Its a double blind system - two transcriptions are compared and assessed.

They have no local knowledge, so ancestry hopes the subscribers (yeh, us who pay for the privilege) will help with the local knowledge to correct the errors. In a way, I think they are right to have transcribers not influenced by local knowledge to do the first transcriptions. Would it be more accurate, or better, if they thought they knew what it was meant to be, rather than just assessing the writing as presented ?

He had some photos of archive storage from some European places they have been to film. Books stacked haphazardly on the floor, and in one case, in the toilet block of an old school. The state of the records must have made microfilming and deciphering them a hair-tearing experience.

So keep up the good work correcting the transcriptions, its great to able to see if someone else is correcting our families' records.

Di

[WendyPusey]

Wish we could alter ages as well. My Grandfather is down as 17 years on one census when it should be 17 months!!!!

[Trina]

Given what you say, I suppose they do a good job - I wouldn't like to transcribe Swahili or whatever! And lets not forget they are going to be a LOT cheaper than trained local people which hopefully means a lot more records online.
On the other hand, records that are grossly wrong aren't much good either!

[Trina]

I agree - just found one like that too!

[Olde Crone Holden]

China seems a very odd choice of place for transcribing records written in ENGLISH, considering that their own writing is completely different from ours and has nothing whatsoever in common with the English language, character recognition or not!

I suppose we should all be grateful they did it on the cheap, otherwise we'd all be paying £1000 a year sub......

I agree with Jill, some of the writing is appalling on the images, but many of the mistakes are just sheer carelessness.

I corrected one yesterday...well, I tried to, I had to practically write a book to explain what I meant, lol - the original transcriber had slipped a line in one column and tried to correct it by writing in the surname with a little arrow. Someone had then put a black line through as an enumerator's mark, so it was only if you knew what you were looking at AND you understood English, that you could work out that she was not a "boarder's daughter" but a boarder.

As yet, Ancestry has no facility to shove everyone up a line on the page, lol!

OC

[Janet in Yorkshire]

To quote OC

"China seems a very odd choice of place for transcribing records written in ENGLISH, considering that their own writing is completely different from ours and has nothing whatsoever in common with the English language, character recognition or not!"

It's probably all the children practising their newly acquired English language skills!:Big Grin:
They come over to one Midlands city in droves in the school holidays and then a lot of them return to follow a full secondary school course, take exams and go on to further ed.
All their lessons at school are in classes with English speaking peers, text books written in English and homework & exams are carried out in the English language too.

Jay

[Uncle John]

We had a "talents hobbies and pastimes" exhibition at church as part of the harvest festival this weekend. I had a laptop with internet access and poked around a couple of folks' families for them. One was a Brimble, almost universally mistranscribed as Bumble. On one census it almost looked like Bumble, with no dot over the i.