I'd have to agree with Caroline. I offer corrections (or alternatives, as allowed by 'Ancestry') when I'm sure of the details but otherwise assume that I'm as likely to confuse others as to inform. John Brown Leic., Eng ----- Original Message ----- From: "Caroline Gurney" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 8:06 PM Subject: Re: [SOG-UK] transcription errors > Peter, > > I think in those circumstances I would leave well alone, as I doubt my > stab at a transcription of an illegible foreign name would be much use > to anyone. > > Caroline > > > > On 1 September 2011 19:46, LostCousins <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I was recently faced with a conundrum. I came across a household >> unrelated to me where - as >> quite often happens - the middle names of some of the members had been >> transcribed as if >> there were surnames (despite perfectly obvious dittos). >> >> However the surname was a very unusual one, possibly foreign - and badly >> written to boot - so I >> really couldn't be sure that it had been transcribed correctly. Indeed, I >> strongly suspected it >> hadn't been, but because of the handwriting it was impossible to >> determine what the enumerator >> had actually written. >> >> Should I submit the correction, even though I was fairly certain that my >> correction was also >> wrong? What would you have done? >> >> Peter

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. The conundrum was not whether to reinterpret the enumerator's handwriting, but whether to submit a correction substituting the transcriber's interpretation of the surname (which, though probably wrong, was approximately right) for the middle name which had been incorrectly inserted in the surname field (and was therefore 100% wrong). Even if the enumerator's interpretation of the surname was wrong, a researcher using wildcards would probably have been able to find the entry - but as things stood, with the middle name substituted for the surname it would have been a far tougher challenge. The conundrum was whether by making this change I would be imbuing the enumerator's interpretation of the surname with spurious credibility. In the event I did decide to make the change. Why? Because at the subscription website I was using there is no way of knowing whether an entry has been corrected as a result of a user submission - so there would have been no way that my correction could have had an adverse impact on other users. However, if I had encountered the error at a different website I might well have reached a different conclusion. Peter On 1 Sep 2011 at 20:18, John Brown wrote: > I'd have to agree with Caroline. I offer corrections (or alternatives, > as allowed by 'Ancestry') when I'm sure of the details but otherwise > assume that I'm as likely to confuse others as to inform. > > John Brown > Leic., Eng > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Caroline Gurney" <[email protected]> > To: <[email protected]> > Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 8:06 PM > Subject: Re: [SOG-UK] transcription errors > > > > Peter, > > > > I think in those circumstances I would leave well alone, as I doubt > > my stab at a transcription of an illegible foreign name would be > > much use to anyone. > > > > Caroline