Oh, those transcriptions...

[speleobat2]

Alan,

Thanks for the links! Suddenly I'm awash in Longmores. I was rechecking my great grandmother's cousins to try to fill in blanks and found one, James Longmore, who was shown as Superintendent of Charities on his death cert. I Googled that and found a piece of a book that placed him in Hobart, Tasmania and Perth, AU! No wonder I couldn't find him on the Scottish census after 1871. Ancestry came up with a piece from something called the Cyclopedia of Western Australia so I emailed my "cousin" in Perth and she found lots of info for me on her CD's. At least one of James' daughters appears to have stayed in Hobart so I may have relatives there! I'll be working on this branch of the tree for quite a while I think!

MB,

I agree that reading all that handwriting can be a challenge, but really, if you transcribed something and it came out Lunine Lemembransin, wouldn't you at least ask yourself, "What in the world is that?" before you hit the send key?

Carol

[Montrose Budie]

......snipped.......

MB,

I agree that reading all that handwriting can be a challenge, but really, if you transcribed something and it came out Lunine Lemembransin, wouldn't you at least ask yourself, "What in the world is that?" before you hit the send key?

Carol

No !!, because I'm just a simple key pusher in the Indian sub-continent, Sri Lanka, mainland China, Taiwan, or The Philippines, or other areas involved, make your choice, and it's not up to me as the key pusher to ask the question "What is that?" as regards Lunine Lemembransin ; instead just to hit what I see as the appropriate keys !

It's that simple...........

Yes, of course, if I were researching the line concerned and came across these census entries, I'd research the background and come up with the appropriate explanations and interpretation of such census entries.

Ancestry, or whoever, data inputters don't have that 'luxury' !

mb

[Heather]

My 2 cents ...

Have done a spell of volunteer transcribing (will rejoin that thought after I retire because it is time consuming
and I just don't have the luxury of any unused time at the moment) and it can be a challenge. It is easy to
look at a transcription (when you have some background of the individual or the situation) and fret as to why
the transcription is so far off.

Well - from my experience - by times - it ain't a easy job

Forgive the transcribers .. many are volunteers and are doing the best they can

Heather

[Montrose Budie]

Hi Heather

I'll always forgive transcribers who are volunteers.

But we're not talking volunteers in this case; we're talking underpaid, under-trained key pressers whose native language is not English, working for the largest genealogical data base company in the world, which demands a considerable sum of money for access to their on-line databases

mb.

[Montrose Budie]

As a follow up, many volunteer indexing projects use a double-entry method.

This involves two different folk independently transcribing/indexing the same material.

Any differences in these inputs are then referred to a third person to resolve the situation: if that third person continues to see an interpretation problem, then the situation is referred to an even more expert person.................. and so on up at least one more level.

That's true double entry, as opposed to "supposed" double entry as used by certain major data providers whose name I couldn't possibly mention, where a seond person might check the first person's input. That is not double-entry as generally understood !

The problem is the time and effort involved in true double-entry, never mind the cost if a company is sub-contracting the key pressing effort. In the latter case, just how many researchers would be prepared to pay 3 or 4 times the subcription cost for access to, say, Ancestry?

This is why the UK FreeBMD and FreeCen projects are taking so long to complete.

One way Ancestry and others aim to compensate is by indexing sufficient fields so that a problematic entry for one field is compensated by there being other fields that can be searched.

Incidentally, does anyone know if the massive FamilySearch indexing project uses double-entry ?

mb

[carlineric]

I remember back in the days of punch cards (just a few years ago ). The cards were double-checked using a special punch which marked the errors. Double-checking has been around for some time.

[LesleyB]

Ah...punch cards. Those were the things I used to draw on....