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Location: Minnesota, United States

Sunday, September 10, 2006

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......

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