I don't know how these genealogy sites are run. Maybe they don't have staff allocated to review or even skim over new transcriptions. It just seems to me that some errors should be blatantly obvious to anyone with a good grasp of the English language and some level of knowledge of English-language names. If the transcriptions are being done by people who lack that overall knowledge, it would be ideal if someone better qualified in that area could review the work. I guess that's not how it's done, for whatever reason (the financial bottom line, probably).
As some have noted, this means that we have to be extra creative when searching for those who have been mistranscribed (whether due to transcriber error or the original writing being bad or hard to read). I, too, have had to resort to going through census images page by page and have been astounded at various mistranscriptions.
Sometimes the errors make me chuckle and sometimes, as with Eight Mouths Fortus Cleary, I just shake my head.
That being said, I'm grateful for all of the genealogy sites and their efforts to make more and more records available to us in better and better formats. It's pretty amazing, when I think about how challenging it was to use a certain site more than 10 years ago and how terrible its census viewer was back then.
And, of course, I'm eternally grateful to Rootschat and the many Rootschatters who have been so kind and helpful over the years.
Josephine
