I hope you don’t mind me using you as a neutral, genealogy savvy sounding board, and apologies in advance for the moan.
I’m involved in running a website which grew out of a hobby, and I hope is of use to at least some of you (http://www.scottishmining.co.uk). Over the years we have gone through various levels of interaction with the public, some tremendously positive, but mostly involving a lot of effort on our part with very little thanks. We also occasionally get some quite upsetting feedback and that’s what I want your input on.
Our policy is not to correct any names or other details from transcribed original documents. On occasion if a mistake makes it difficult to locate a record, we will add an annotation to help, but we won’t do this for a simple alternate spelling e.g. Mackie when death cert is McKie or a mistake in firstname. We always double check our transcripton when queried and send a polite explanation of our position. We often get critical responses, and once previously we got a rather abusive e-mail. Yesterday we got another quite rather upsetting one (we are disrespecting the memory of their G grandfather by not correcting “our” mistake) which on top of a few negative ones in recent weeks makes us both want to shut up shop. I would appreciate any more neutral views (positive or negative) on whether our non-correction/non-annotation policy is valid.
Our reason for not adding lots of annotations is 2-fold. Firstly, time. Secondly, we are aware people often misunderstand what is from the original records vs our additions. Of course for the indexes we compile for the more recent records, we always update per relative requests as these are not originals.
Lindsay
