Recent developments on Ancestry, whitiver it's noo ca'ed, have radically altered optimum search strategies in the Scottish censuses, particularly when there's common name problems, or other problems.
The GROS indexes on line at
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk are so-called "thin" indexes, i.e. the fields that are searchable are few in number.
The Ancestry indexes, - so far, 1841, '51 and '61 are "fatter" indexes, in the sense that more fields are included in the indexes which can be searched, plus it's possible to search without having to enter the surname; and link the search to the presence in the household of another name.
As yet, I haven't sufficient personal experience to make a judgement, but from what I've seen of the opinion of others whose opinion I trust, the Ancestry indexes are worthwhile, even although there appear to be major problems in terms of the accuracy of the indexing...... the saving grace being the number of fields that can be searched, and the ways in which search info can be combined.
To give you a flavour of the transcription errors in the Ancestry Scottish census indexes, I only just y'day was made aware of the following entry for place of birth, - "Deaf& Dumb, England" !!
In other words, the indexer, or the OCR software involved, assumed that the entry in the column before the place of birth column was associated, i.e. the parish, as opposed to being the entry in the column relating to mental or physical disability ........
BTW, the instructions in this context in term of mental disability were, over the various censuses where such info was requested, along the following lines, -
Lunatic: “A mentally ill person with periods of lucidity”.
Imbecile: "Persons who have fallen in later life into a state of chronic dementia"
Idiot: "..those who suffer from congenital mental deficiency."
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