Transcription troubles
Following up on Dr Alan Crosby’s column in January’s issue [on the idea of ‘completing’ your family history], I believe after trawling through Essex registers on seax.essexcc.gov.uk page by page for the past five years that I have come to the end of the road on my side. “Finished”, like his gentleman said. However, inspired by Alan’s resolution “to get back even further this year”, I hope I can follow on my wife’s side in different counties. I have taken a yearly subscription to a wellknown family history site hoping to find useful data and a marriage in the 1880s that has eluded me for years.
However, despite the wealth of information out there, my research has been hampered by many transcription errors. As a start, I decided to look for the 1911 census of my grandparents. It took me several hours to locate it – the four-letter surname was wrongly transcribed in this database, so was the village and so was one of the children’s forenames being Thomas instead of John originally written as “Jhon”.
Actually, in this database, none of the bloodline in the censuses from 1911 back to 1851 had the correct surname, and more to the point only the 1911 census had the first letter correct. I am not decrying the transcribers’ work, for they do a wonderful job and I know from experience how difficult it can be. However, it was frustrating because it took a long time finding data that I knew was there – a novice or someone less persistent might think that the information was missing and give up.
Consequently, as I am now looking for people who probably moved around, I wonder if I am using these databases to best effect or if my money has been wasted? And, oh how I would love a hard copy of those 1880s marriages to trawl through at home. Richard Dellar, by email Editor replies: It sounds as if you have been particularly unlucky there Richard, although I’m sure all of us have stories to tell of mis-transcriptions. Subscription websites can be extremely useful for tracing people who moved around as your searches are not confined to a county. If you prefer ‘turning the pages’, as you did with SEAX, it’s worth knowing that most subscription sites also let you browse if you drill down to the individual record set.