Lots of comments – nearly all negative

Nothing posted from Ancestry since the 16th despite a promise of regular updates

my feelings

That they are a large global company who family historians pay a huge amount of money to in order to access records.

If they want to hang on to their long term subscibers in the current financial climate, they are going to have to take a long hard look at

HOW AND WHY THEY GOT THIS ONE SO WRONG – NOT JUST THE FIASCO OF THE RECORDS THEMSELVES – BUT HOW THEY DEALT WITH OR RATHER FAILED TO DEAL WITH THE COMMENTS LEFT BY THE 80 PEOPLE ABOVE WHO WERE MAD ENOUGH TO POST A COMMENT – THERE MUST BE THOUSANDS MORE WHO FEEL THE SAME WAY.

Thats it – I feel better now – Merry Christmas

Rawalpindi (down as Rawal Pindi)is not in Pakistan in 1911, Pakistan didn’t exist until 1947, as most people know;
Wexford is listed as England and not Ireland.
Aust is also the transcription for Austria (ie the Austrian Empire);
Thun transcribed for Lithuania, there is a Thun in Switzerland;
Russia not transcribed;
One person listed as two seperate people although there are brackets showing it was one person.

The list is a joke with so many variations that you could write a book of possible spellings and almost totally unuseable and transcribers should not have to such a situation, it should not be up to subscribers to alter the transcriptions, it should have been in a fit state. The transcriptions are just bad transcribing. If I was the CEO I would be asking who put this awful list out.

Mercifully, though, the occupations are almost always correctly transcribed — unlike the nonsensical gibberish in occupations found in the 1911 Channel Islands or Wales censuses.

Many of these London hotels have an international clientele — and sometimes staff — so there are many different birthplaces listed.

However, countries and other locations which are clearly readable are very often left completely blank, time after time — eg. Holland, The Netherlands, USA, United States, Japan, Turkey, Chile, Cuba, Luxembourg, California, Amsterdam, At sea, etc.

But, for some reason, countries such as Switzerland, Germany and France are almost always transcribed and correctly too. Uruguay, however, is mistranscribed as Hungary.

It’s also typical that many entries are only partially transcribed, eg. entries saying London but also including a specific London place name such as Whitechapel, Westminster, Bow, Hammersmith, Bermondsey, Lambeth, Fulham, etc. say only London (in the United Kingdom!)

Other examples of this type are below (showing what actual entry says, followed by what has been transcribed) —
Burlington, Ont., Canada > Canada
Chicago, America > United States

Then there is the supposed computer glitch which chops up words, again resulting in only a partial transcription. This has already been mentioned by others in examples such as Ham (for Clapham, Peckham, etc) or Wall for Cornwall.

Here are more examples, again showing the actual entry first, followed by what the transcription says –

New Cross, London > Ross
Overstrand, Norfolk > Rand, Norfolk
Pettistree, Suffolk > Street, Suffolk
Copenhagen > Hagen
Brockley, Kent > Rock, Kent
Singapore > Ore
Gibraltar > Alt
Croydon, Surrey > Roydon, Surrey
Strand, London > Rand
Charing Cross, London > Ross
Birmingham, Warwickshire > Wick, Warwick
Birkenhead, Cheshire > Esh, Cheshire
Crewe, Cheshire > Rewe, Cheshire
Kirkcaldy > Caldy
Wallingford > Wall
Hastings > Asti
Buenos Ayres > Ayr, Scotland
Australia > Aust (as the birth city)
Antrim, Ireland > Trim, Antrim, Ireland
Christchurch, New Zealand > Church, New Zealand
Ballymena, Ireland > Bally, Ireland
Rhode Island, USA > Rho
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA > Wil

Also, locations ending in “chester” — such as Manchester or Colchester — are repeatedly transcribed with Chester in the birth county field.

Entries which say New York, USA or New York City are repeatedly mistranscribed as York, York, England.

Entries which say Glasgow, Lanarkshire are transcribed as Glasgow, Scotland with Glasgow as the birth county.

Entries which list the birthplace as New South Wales (then say Australian in the following field) are transcribed as –
New, New South Wales (with New in the birth city field and New South Wales as birth country)

In many cases, absolutely nothing is transcribed in the birthplace field even though there is a birthplace plainly there in the original entry. And entries which include specific locations in English counties are transcribed as follows –
Bristol, Gloucestershire > Gloucester, Gloucester
Bradford, Yorkshire > York, York
Grimsby, Lincs > Lincoln, Lincoln

And lastly, Jack Straws Castle Hotel in Hampstead is listed in the transcription as Lack Trans Castle Hotel.

I personally view this shoddy work as insulting and disrespectful to Ancestry’s paying subscribers.

Precisely FOUR people from one family in Essex have been indexed.

If you did not know that Ryde was on the Isle of Wight (IOW), 10 seconds on Google would have shown that LDW was rubbish.

Add to that the mistranscribed middle name (Haward instead of Howard) and the fact that she had moved from the IoW to Coventry leaves me feeling very lucky to have found her.

Ancestry never wanted to bother with this Census in the first place, I sure everyone remembers the comments when they pulled out of the bidding for the early release. Now we have had this reinforced by the obvious use of the ‘B’ team on the transcription. Can you imagine the row if this was a US Census!

I guess that there must have been something in the air in those days, because there’s a whole slew of centenarians listed that are waaaaaaay older than their parents on this census. Truly amazing!!!!!!

I hope I’m that lucky to show up like that in a hundred years or so.

“… when I’ve submitted a correction FindMyPast has fixed it within a day or two”.

Of course when we make corrections to blatant errors on Ancestry they are NEVER “fixed”, they are merely added as “alternatives”. Ancestry can never admit they are wrong!!!!

In my view common sense should have occcured, eg people aged over 100 attending school and being about 50 years older than their mother and people being born in the 1790s, there are people who are over 100 years old but 120 years old, I don’t think so.