John H Ballard <jballard@dslextreme.com> wrote: > Are these census errors and bad indexing in recent discussions > coming from errors in the original enumerations? Or, are some or > all being found only in incorrect transcriptions by ancestry.com? > Important distinction. A few week back there was a whole series of loud complaints about "lousy indexing" by Ancestry.com. In nearly every one of these cases, the indexing was accurate - it was the way the name was rendered in the enumeration that was the culprit. With regard to Ancestry's indexing: It has done only two censuses - the 1920 and 1930. The other census indexes it uses are primarily those created nearly 20 years ago by Accelerated Indexing Systems - and these have plenty of indexing errors as they were done in SE Asia with cheap labor. And when we talk about "all these census errors" we need to keep in mind that the ones that get posted here are the ones people are having problems with. Think of it this way: Ancestry.com supposedly has a million subscribers (Wall Street Journal story). That means there are likely many thousands of people searching census records each day. If the enumerators and indexers are as bad as some seem to think, there would be a torrent of messages seeking help instead of the daily handful. And, as bad as we may think some of the indexes are, they are miles better than the alternative - page by page searches through whole counties (which is the way it used to be not so long ago!). We also have to remember that all the indexers have to work with is microfilm - and a lot of that is not clearly legible. I sometimes look at a bunch of dim chicken scratches and marvel that the indexers got ANY of the letters right - and they had them all correct! Richard "Richard A. Pence" <richardpence@pipeline.com>