I agree with what you say and I think the errors are so bad that it unlikely to let researchers having any confidence that they have found all of the records on their ancestors. If ancestry don’t want to do the work to an acceptable standard themselves, then pay family history societies to do it properly. The only good thing is that findmypast got the contract for the 1911 census!.

The 1911 does seem to be the worst of the lot, though. But I will be very very surprised if those errors are ever corrected. It’s obvious that this is just not a priority for Ancestry.

Perhaps I am being naive but I have always believed that a core concept of genealogy — and a primary responsibility for family historians — is the obligation to duplicate/reproduce original records as accurately as possible. The transcript should reflect what the original says. Otherwise, “research” based on those transcripts may be worthless.

Also recently found over 600 pages of one section of Hertfordshire which is all transcribed as being in Middlesex.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which birthplaces have been transcribed and which haven’t. Most of them are in the UK. It isn’t a question of not being able to read the original entry — it’s quite easy to see what the entry actually says.

I strongly feel that Ancestry needs to spend time correcting the countless transcription errors in all the millions of records they already have on their website, rather than continually adding new records which are very often just as bad — or worse — than incorrect ones which have already been on the site for years and years. Because, as David said in the previous comment, “there is no point in having more records if you can’t find the records”.

And, for example, I have found many many people in all the censuses, from 1841 onward, who I thought had no chance of being found by anyone looking for them because every single detail about them was mistranscribed. And, much too often, this is nonsensical gobbledegook (nonsense words or names) which is so clearly incorrect.

However, rather than spend time and money correcting mistranscriptions, Ancestry is spending what must be huge sums on TV ads here in Canada (where I live). These ads have appeared several times every day for months, on various channels –including American channels which we also see in Canada — and are, of course, to lure people into joining Ancestry and researching their family. All are told as heartwarming stories of success from supposedly “ordinary” people. There is, of course, no mention in them of possible difficulties — or even complete failure — as a result of mistranscriptions or mistakes.

Lastly, I will add that I didn’t always feel this disillusioned. Like most researchers, I started out starry-eyed and trusting in the accuracy of the transcriptions. Gradually, though, I came to realise that there were many errors which I dutifully sent in to alert Ancestry. Then I started noticing that none of the errors were ever corrected. But, I thought, that wasn’t so bad because there were only errors here and there.

However, it wasn’t until Ancestry changed their census search format several years ago so that the original page image was shown with the transcribed info immediately below it that it became glaringly obvious just how very many errors there were and how horrible the transcriptions actually were.

Ironically, this came about as a result of Ancestry providing an “improvement” to subscribers — a chance to directly and easily compare the original to the transcript. But all it did was show how incorrect the transcript so very often was.

No, I have not contacted Ancestry at all to let them know about errors and I very much doubt that I will. My reasons are as follows –

1) My repeated past experience with Ancestry is that nothing will be done. I do get a reply, thanking me for alerting them to an error. But when I have revisited the erroneous data later (sometimes years later), I find that nothing has been corrected.

2) There are simply too many errors in all the censuses, including 1911, to spend time alerting Ancestry to each and every one.

3) Ancestry was alerted almost three months ago about the many transcription errors occurring in the 1911 census.
For example, see over 80 subscriber comments posted in reply to the Ancestry blog post in December which is titled “1911 Census – millions more searchable records”.
Many of the comments posted there clearly describe the extent and type of 1911 transcription errors. There are also a couple of replies from Ancestry that they were aware of the problems but this was described by them as “minor”.

4) Surely it is Ancestry’s responsibility to correct errors on their own website and not a job for subscribers alone (as seems to be the case now and has been for years).

For example, a few years ago, Ancestry informed me in one of their replies that corrections are not their responsibility — but mine as a subscriber. See comments I posted on 22 January in the blog post titled “130 Years of London Electoral Registers Released Today!”
Many of the 56 comments posted there were also about errors in transcription so I posted what I thought might be relevent info told to me by Ancestry several years earlier when I contacted them about people I had found who were missing altogether from the census transcriptions.

In that reply, Ancestry told me that –
“..we generally receive data from outside sources and post it as it was provided to us. In order to maintain authenticity in our records, we cannot make changes directly to material not created by Ancestry. To make these types of changes, you will need to contact the original creators of this data, have them correct this in their own records and then send this update to us for posting…”

In other words, Ancestry couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about errors on their own site. Instead, it was up to me, as a subscriber, to take steps to correct errors.

I hope this answeers your question, Trevor. Sorry for the very long reply