Indexing issues again

We have touched on this issue a few times on the blog but here we go one more time! Somehow a number of the indexes on Ancestry.com for the U.S. censuses ended up with numerous errors, including the abbreviation Ind. being listed as India on the index itself. Now obviously the number of Americans with German names living in Minnesota in the 1880, 1900 and 1910 censuses being born in India should be a relatively small number, but quite a few have been falsely assigned to India as a birth place. The explanation I recently read was that those paid to index these censues actually live in India, and thus the false conclusion for a birthplace based on their own experience with the English language.

Now one would hope that the major genealogical database in the world on the Internet would have quality control and a verification process that includes spot checks to verify accuracy, as the extraction programs here in the U.S. generally have when working with volunteers. In the perfect genealogy world......

New Search Eengine

Ask.com claims to be a "better search engine" so I give it a test run and found a few interesting differences from Google. For example, genealogy searches for a specific name in a locale brought fewer, but more focused results than my usual "end of line" checks for new online information. I was pleased with this level of filtering since I generally have to wade through so many unrelated web pages that merely mention the surname in question, even though I use genealogy as a key word in the search. The links were clean and quick- I just wish that I could say that I found an answer to one of the current research challenges that I have, but I didn't this time. The down side was that I couldn't connect to this blog page directly, so I don't know if they have included blogs in their parameters at this point.

Give it a try and success in the search!