> 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 A. Pence" <richardpence@pipeline.com> In the newsletter received from Ancestry.com today they announced an update to 1920 and 1930 census and indexes, correcting previous errors and improving the quality of some images. What a tremendous task they have undertaken to provide this service! My earlier comment was not a complaint, just a statement of fact, that if I couldn't find it on Ancestry.com I would go to Genealogy.com (FTM) and could usually find who I was looking for through their Index. Each system has it good points and I use both ... thankful they are available to us. Tempe ===== Tempe Berggren http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Oaks/6370 http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/b/e/r/Tempe-T-Berggren/ Tempe Berggren <tberggren@yahoo.com>