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General => Technical Help => Topic started by: Darwin on Thursday 05 November 20 07:37 GMT (UK)
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Is there a glitch at the moment? I haven't had this happen before but the LifeStories on my people have gone bonkers and are changing all the places to other places in the world eg saying Devonshire, Bermuda instead of Devonshire or Devon England, even though in the facts it clearly says Devon, England. It's happening all over the place so all the Life Stories are now useless. I can change them manually but I can't do that to hundreds of profiles! I've used Ancestry for years and never had this happen before. Is this happening for anyone else and does anyone know how to stop it?
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Just looked at a random selection of my tree - all look OK.
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Thanks for the reply. Do you have world access or just UK & Ireland?
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I’ve had that problem on and off for years. Every now and again I recheck. The best was my 2 times great grandparents who died in Bairnsdale, Gippsland, Victoria, Australia. Suddenly they were in Trinidad and Tobago. Son suggested I wait until Australia was playing cricket there and he would accompany me to visit. ;D ;D
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UK and Ireland only.
I've never noticed a problem, even when I had worldwide access.
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This may seem counter intuitive, but it is advice from Ancestry themselves.
Rather than typing in the full name manually, use the autofill drop down menus. Ancestry (the program) knows where those are and stores them correctly.
That said, I personally came across this particular piece of advice just recently (I have been binge watching videos by "The Barefoot Genealogist" Crista Cowan to find out about Ancestry DNA whilst waiting for my results) and at least for my main tree it is largely useless since the dropdown list includes numerous misspellings and truncated references from eg census transcriptions, as well as at least one typo of my own - Shotts Esat District instead of Shotts East District.
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Thanks for the replies. For a tree I'm working on now, I did try the drop down menu for Tiverton - it gave the choice of six different options so I chose Tiverton, Devon, England. The LifeStory has changed that to Tiverton, Cheshire, England. :'(
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If I understand it correctly, and it is perfectly possible I don't, Ancestry is pre programmed, so to speak with a large number of locations that it knows, and particularly for the US will fill in the correct county for you as well. so if you pick one of those pre entered drop down options, it works perfectly. So far so good.
The problem is, it adds every location you type in, as well as any location that is read directly from a census (even mistranscriptions) to that drop down menu. Sadly, even if a location is added manually by you entirely accurately, Ancestry doesn't recognise that name, so will reset it to the closest match it can find in it's known list - in this case Tiverton, Cheshire, which it "knows" rather than Tiverton, Devon, which it doesn't.
It seems to me it would be much better if the program didn't keep adding to it's drop down menus, but only included the place names it actually recognises - after all, how can the user know the difference between "Tiverton, Devon, England" that is on the list because they typed it in full on a previous entry, and "Tiverton, Devon, England" which Ancestry knows and recognises?
My own personal favourite is when I carefully typed "Wishaw, Lanark, Scotland" and Ancestry changed it to "Wishaw, Lanark, Scotland, Texas, USA"
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They've obviously been making changes. Last time I looked, any address with a comma between the house number and the street name was converted to a random place in the USA.
They appear to have fixed that, so the ones I've looked at appear to be OK now. Where I specified England they now say England too.
I always specify the country, except for the two events which say "At Sea". I've been lucky that most of the country names in my trees have not changed, though there are Great War casualties in what is now Iraq. I don't think I've seen "Mesopotamia" in Ancestry's drop down lists!
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I had a very helpful chat with an Ancestry adviser and she confirmed what people said above that Ancestry has a bank of recognised names that it defaults to. I'll just have to live with it and not use the LifeStory - to be honest I'm not that keen on it anyway but the errors in it are annoying me.
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OK the problem is worse than I thought and I've decided I'm not going to live with it. I've been a member of Ancestry for 16 years and I pay them a lot of money for a service that's now not working for me. It's not just the LifeStory that's messed up. I could live without that but due to Ancestry's failure to include Tiverton, Devon in their locations, I can't search on any of my people that have Tiverton as a location for their events. For example, I just looked at one that I have entered the births, census returns & marriage for Tiverton, Devon (which is reflected accurately in the facts) and tried to search further but the search defaults to Tiverton, Cheshire.
This might seem like a minor problem affecting one small place but it isn't. Tiverton, Devon is a significant town in Devon (pop 20,000) and also an official registration district of BMD for a wider area. Tiverton, Cheshire is tiny village (pop 300) so the default to it is utterly ridiculous.
It gets worse... The old name for Devon is Devonshire so it comes up a lot in records but instead of defaulting to Devon, England (pop 200,000) Ancestry defaults to Devonshire, Bermuda (pop 7,000). I am not going to accept this. Ancestry needs to do its homework on English place names and their significance. I've filed another query with them and I'll keep you updated on their response.
Update: 12 hours later and I've just received a generic reply telling me to fill in the locations properly. I've responded that I know how to do that and I want them to pass my complaint up the chain to people with the power to deal with it.
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Good news!
Ancestry have been very helpful and after I sent them some screenshots they requested, they've agreed to add Tiverton, Devon to their locations, which will solve the problem.
They can't add Devonshire because as an old name, it comes up less often than Devonshire, Bermuda so I can live with that as almost all records use Devon.
It just goes to show that if you know they can and should fix a problem, you should pursue it because once they can see you have a strong case for changing something, they'll do it.