"Eight Mouths Fortus Cleary" - the most ridiculous transcription error ever?

[eadaoin]

Of course, to be fair, sometimes the writing is appalling!

One of our relatives, born 1970s, went for his birth cert to the GRO Dublin.He knew his name and birthdate(!) and 20 minutes later the cert came back, nicely typed, wrong father's name! OLIVER instead of OWEN
The harrassed girl went off and came back with the original, and it could have been Oliver (sort of) .. or Owen or Oisin or anything! (The other Christian name was also almost illegible)

eadaoin

[Josephine]

It was such a spectacular error that I couldn't bring myself to report it. 

[PaulineJ]

The PLUS side of improbable transcriptions is that the human eye picks out the obvious duffers and can check those first.

eg Alice "Nlstetoom" aka Alice Wheable  RG13/74/ Fol43/ P24

[doddsie4]

      I searched for a family named Dale on the 1871 census, but couldn't find it.      I tried Dail, then Dayle, and even Dill.      Finally, I found it.       There it was ... DOLE.       

[tillypeg]

One in the GRO index - Ruaggs - should have been Knaggs.  No way of amending that.

[Ayashi]

Look me a while to find one of my URWINs in the GRO index... it was under URRY! I only found it because I already had the date of death, was looking for the actual GRO number.

[hanes teulu]

I may be wrong, and I'm sure someone will correct me, but I think that a lot of the transcripts are carried out by non-english  speaking people who are possibly paid a pittance for doing so.  [/q

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/foi/1911-census-transcription.htm

Not sure of 1841 - 1901!!

[silaswall]

Although my grandmother was on the original 1911 Census she failed to make it onto the typed transcript. Took me a while to work out to report the error.

[hanes teulu]

1901 Census   www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2003/11/02031259.pdf