A member of my NEWHOUSE family, John NEWHOUSE, was indexed as John N. HENDERSON in the 1880 Weakley Co. TN Census, Dist. 14, in the ancestry.com index and also in census on www.familysearch.org . I finally came across them, accidentally, when browsing the district looking for someone else. To me, the name was, definitely NEWHOUSE, and, of course, I was already familiar with his wife and children's names and ages, which matched, but transcribers who didn't know the family, evidently, read the surname differently. I'm pretty sure that some of the people I've been unable to find in census in certain years are probably there but with a totally different name -- one that even Soundex wouldn't be able to find. The transcription of NEWHOUSE to HENDERSON is probably the biggest mistake I've come across in any transcription. Brenda ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Saunders" <saunders@utm.edu> To: <tnweakle@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2007 8:34 AM Subject: [TNWEAKLE] Census transcriptions >I had a man in from Michigan doing research on the IVIE family from > Gardiner. He had been frustrated because they could not be located in > Ancestry. After checking the film we discovered the name had been > mistranscribed as EVIE. > > That got me thinking--transcription is a subjective art, but generally > pretty accurate. Has anyone else had problems with mistranscriptions in > the census indices? I wonder how wide-spread the issue is. > > ***** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ***** > Richard Saunders, Curator > Special Collections/Univ. Archives 731-881-7094 > Univ. of Tennessee at Martin fax 731-881-7074 > Martin, Tenn. 38238 saunders@utm.edu > > ***** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ***** > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > TNWEAKLE-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message