Acceptable Margins of Error on Findmypast

[MaryA]

I know many of us search using a wide criteria - I know I often use just "Lancashire" even when looking for somebody in Liverpool, just in case they are recorded under Everton, Toxteth or another area. But I didn't think I would fall down over the county.

Having searched for an Edith Fletcher perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised when I discovered her name as EIDTH, and yes it was actually written that way on the sheet, but perhaps the enumerator was a little tiddly when he wrote the place of birth as "LANCES, LIVERPOOL". Now generally speaking both FindMyPast and Ancestry would transcribe "Lancs" as Lancashire so that it can be found in searches, but "Lances" matches the original census form within an acceptable margin of error and they will not amend the transcription - this means that a search of Lancashire will not find it - is this silly or what?

Just a warning to be careful of what you search for.

[Blue70]

I've had similar experiences with FMP they need to revise their system to make common sense changes permitted. Finding the records should take priority over accuracy of transcription.


Blue

[dickiesam]

I believe the problem to be one of copyright and the National Archive. Having come across similar problems before I engaged one of the Findmypast people on the subject of commonsense errors some time ago. The response was that under their agreement with the NA they are not allowed to actually change anything that the enumerator wrote down on the summary sheets, other than 'expanding' on the county of origin where necessary for search indexing. So they can index Lancashire for Lancs but blatant errors such as Lances cannot be 'corrected'.

One instance I referred to was of a male child in a family who had his relationship to the head entered as 'Do' for ditto and his age was in the Male column. Unfortunately the child above him was female and entered as 'Daughter' so William was transcribed as a daughter!