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« on: Tuesday 10 April 18 17:39 BST (UK) »
Composite response.
I think this subject is more complex than you seem to find it.
'I am not altogether sure what you mean by "Some transcribers have included deleted names"'
In 1911 censuses there is a regular sprinkling of pages where eg. a whole family have been included but several names have been deleted, presumably dead or married and moved away or whatever. In some cases it may only be one person. As a serious researcher I'd be interested in every scrap of information.
1911 again, in Ancestry, occasionally a page is totally blank but the enumerator's slip gives a name and sometimes 'Gone away' or whatever. None of these names have been included. A monstrous omission.
If the material is copyright, why are the public let loose onto it to make suggested corrections? What is the difference between a correction, and a request that a name has not been transcribed and needs adding?
Interesting that FindMyPast use the word 'reflect' on their corrections page:-
'We can only amend transcriptions where they fail to reflect what was actually written in the original record'.
I asked them what to do with a name, let's say it was Reed, where the second e had been neatly crossed through and letter i inserted over. How do you transcribe that exactly? In fact, the answer I got was such that the presumed Reid would not have appeared in its correct alphabetical place in the index.
In a family, where the wife's surname has been obscured / partly obscured by a blob, yet is clearly written in for the other members you seem to be Saying don't include it?
I don't remember the instructions for FreeCEN which are probably the same as those for FreeREG as it was so many years ago that I did work on GLS for them.
Here's another transcription poser. How do you deal with a name written in Cyrillic - which is somewhere in LND 1891 or 1901? And what about the several entries in Hebrew?
A search of names which include x or have letter x at the end are to be found wrongly transcribed by the use of sc - and in profusion. Look at Mascted, Riscon, Cosc etc. Many have the apparent s and c widely separated, so the transcriber is simply obeying the instructions and not using commonsense.
These sorts of probems abound. They are not just a few - there are many others - and they need sensible solutions so that targets can be found and not obscured by having been given rigid scholarly treatment.
Maybe your Dodd is buried away somewhere because of a Jobsworth simply carrying out orders!
I would appreciate your observations on *all* of these matters.