Major errors in new Ancestry Databases
Posted: 24 Jan 2015 11:26
This rant does not dwell on old errors, but concerns new databases that have recently been acquired by Ancestry.
One is Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2013 and has been described by a blogger as a "strange collection" with the " lack of detail about its source didn't make it any less strange"
The other which concerns me even more is the England and Wales, Death Index, 2007-2013
This is the link if you want to read somebody else's opinion and the source for these databases and also the coverage of them.
http://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2015/ ... s-new.html
You might be thinking, as I was that this could well bring some of our research up to date in ways that were never possible previously, but try searching as I did for an entry that you actually know the details of and see if the entry is correct.
My mother died in 2010, she lived in Kirkby and the death was registered in Prescot, which is the registration district for Kirkby. However one of the data fields is "Residence Place at Death" which has the result of "Liverpool, Lancashire, England".
Now Kirkby is part of the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley and has been part of Merseyside since April 1974. So not only is the place incorrect ie it certainly should NOT be Liverpool, it certainly doesn't reflect the Registration District, or even the County.
For that matter, Liverpool itself hasn't been in Lancashire since 1974 when it became part of Merseyside.
Yes I have telephoned Ancestry and played the "distressed" card and received an apology and a promise to have this database looked into, but whether it will actually be changed in any meaningful way I don't know.
There are other parts of the country having the same problems, there are a couple of suggestions as to why this is - one is that the first part of the postcode is given for the entry and perhaps Ancestry mapping has something to do with it. The other suggestion is that the data company has collated this information from obituaries. To confirm this latter supposition I actually checked the entry in the obituaries for my mother and discovered that the postcode was not mentioned so this could not be the place where the information has been gleaned from.
One is Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2013 and has been described by a blogger as a "strange collection" with the " lack of detail about its source didn't make it any less strange"
The other which concerns me even more is the England and Wales, Death Index, 2007-2013
This is the link if you want to read somebody else's opinion and the source for these databases and also the coverage of them.
http://www.irishgenealogynews.com/2015/ ... s-new.html
You might be thinking, as I was that this could well bring some of our research up to date in ways that were never possible previously, but try searching as I did for an entry that you actually know the details of and see if the entry is correct.
My mother died in 2010, she lived in Kirkby and the death was registered in Prescot, which is the registration district for Kirkby. However one of the data fields is "Residence Place at Death" which has the result of "Liverpool, Lancashire, England".
Now Kirkby is part of the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley and has been part of Merseyside since April 1974. So not only is the place incorrect ie it certainly should NOT be Liverpool, it certainly doesn't reflect the Registration District, or even the County.
For that matter, Liverpool itself hasn't been in Lancashire since 1974 when it became part of Merseyside.
Yes I have telephoned Ancestry and played the "distressed" card and received an apology and a promise to have this database looked into, but whether it will actually be changed in any meaningful way I don't know.
There are other parts of the country having the same problems, there are a couple of suggestions as to why this is - one is that the first part of the postcode is given for the entry and perhaps Ancestry mapping has something to do with it. The other suggestion is that the data company has collated this information from obituaries. To confirm this latter supposition I actually checked the entry in the obituaries for my mother and discovered that the postcode was not mentioned so this could not be the place where the information has been gleaned from.