I'm sorry, Diane. I should have made clear I was talking about the IGI records from the old FamilySearch site which many people still use. I often go back to the "Previous Site" and use Advanced Search when using FamilySearch. That allows me to separately access the IGI, or the U.S. Social Security Death Index, or Ancestral File, etc. for what I want. I can many times find the name and address of the submitter on Ancestral File and contact them for more information as they are probably distant cousins. I've received so much more information, as well as pictures and family stories that would never be available to me otherwise. I've also been able to find which of the descendants are from straight male lines for DNA purposes. You are correct about the new FAmilySearch site. The old records were sorted out, as well as the name(s) of the submitters. Lynne -----Original Message----- From: Diana Trenchard Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 5:04 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Dyfed] The Written word. Lynne wrote: Some of the entries on the IGI were extracted from parish records and are, therefore, ok. Other entries were submitted by people in the Mormon Church because they were asked to submit names to the Church fathers so that the deceased person could be baptized by proxy in the Temple. I don't think it was done from malice, but from ignorance. Unfortunately, these records are all combined together on the IGI, and one has to look at each entry to find if it was an extraction (transcription) or a submission. I think the FHL is now in the process of sorting all of that out. [End of quote] Lynne, you are rather out of date. The IGI was sorted some time back so that any information submitted by members is now in a separate database, and those extracted directly from parish registers are now the 'normal' search. Check the Source codes if you don't believe me. They also apparently include records from the Vital Records Index but these are easily distinguishable. The IGI also includes variant spellings, so that 'Tritchard' and 'Transherde' appear for 'Trenchard' I've recently been reconciling my records, obtained personally many moons ago directly from the parish records, with those in the Mormon 'Family Search'. Of the several thousand records I've only found one error, which is understandable as to why it appears. It was for a female named Philip (in the time several centuries back when English women were frequently given male names), and that was the name on the memorial in the parish church erected by her son - and he should certainly have known what his mother was called. It had been erroneously transcribed as Philis. This is in contrast with Ancestry where, on average, one in five entries has an error in my experience of looking at what must be well into thousands of records. Most of these are minor, but the most recent one was where 'Rebekah' had been transcribed as 'Obadiah'. Such major errors can introduce a serious block in research if reliance is placed only on databases of transcriptions such as Ancestry or FindMyPast and, to a lesser extent in the IGI. Since we no longer have access to original parish records, I would recommend that the most reliable databases are those done by the local Family History Societies, frequently obtainable on CD or fiche, then the IGI and last the commercial databases. Note that it is no use the latter providing access to the original parish record if it has been wrongly transcribed in the first place. Diana ================================ Dyfed list http://home.clara.net/daibevan/DyfedML.html ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message