The worst Ancestry transcription ever?

[BumbleB]

Tin man - NOOOOO - you have to transcribe exactly what you see.   Interpretation should NOT enter into transcriptions of records.

[LizzieW]

Whenever I've transcribed records (not Ancestry), two people have had to transcribe the same record and if there was a discrepancy it was looked at again by other people.  This way, there was a good chance that the eventual record  transcription would be correct.

Lizzie

[Tin man]

So a transcription is exactly what you see. So if for example, a transcriber came across the name SMITH spelt SMIFF, they would have to transcribe it as SMIFF?

[mckha489]

So a transcription is exactly what you see. So if for example, a transcriber came across the name SMITH spelt SMIFF, they would have to transcribe it as SMIFF?

Yes.
And similarly if it says Wm you cannot put William.

[Tin man]

Oh, i see.
What about a spoken transcription? When the enumerators were filling in the census in the 1900's, if they heard SMIFF they would surely have written SMITH? knowing that the illiterate householder just mis-pronounced their own surname?

[BumbleB]

Sorry, Tin man - Whatever is written is what it is - we can never know what the enumerator heard!!

[mckha489]

Oh, i see.
What about a spoken transcription? When the enumerators were filling in the census in the 1900's, if they heard SMIFF they would surely have written SMITH? knowing that the illiterate householder just mis-pronounced their own surname?

I imagine that varied according to the enumerators at the time.  I get the impression some of them were more literate than others.  And yes..if they knew what the name really was they probably wrote it.

But this can be an issue with for example H names.  Eg someone might say their surname is ORTON and the enumerator thinks , “Oh, from the way you speak, you must  mean HORTON”. But actually, they really are ORTON  (of course this is the sort of name that changes anyway over the generations for that very reason, but you understand what I mean I hope)

Anyway…all this is to show - always look at the original image if you possibly can (because the other thing that transcribers have is a certain number of fields available to fill. And sometimes there is information on the image that isn’t in the transcription.
The other problem is fast typing.  It is very easy to write for example 1689 instead of 1698. 

And I’ve done transcribing where the thing I am transcribing clearly has an error, but because it is there in the original document It has to be perpetuated.


It would be very boring if it was all straight forward. There wouldn’t be the satisfaction of solving something.

[Tin man]

ah yes, i get it. A written mistake has to be repeated even if it's known to be wrong. What an enumerator heard will never be known because it was an oral record. Fast typing creates mistakes - i meant to type 1800's not 1900's.
Thankyou. 

[andrewalston]

Don't forget that people did not write down what was said, but what they THOUGHT they heard.

My own paternal ggg gf appears in various records with his surname spelled in NINE different ways. None of these spellings matches my own surname.

Are these names wrong? No.

I can't guess how he pronounced the name, but "educated" people commonly had trouble figuring out what he said.

I use the version which appears on his baptism and burial as the "primary" name. All the versions appear in my FH software with dates against them.

When my ggf married in 1891 the clergyman write down yet another version; one he would have been familiar with. His bride was literate, so the new version stuck.