Skewed redactions in 1939 Register, Hartlepool Durham

[Mart 'n' Al]

Can anyone explain or comment on this?  Are the skewed redactions in the centre of the page deliberate, or a photo error?

Martin

[andrewalston]

Someone mis-keyed a line number when transcribing, or forgot to transcribe one entry.

Each column was transcribed without the person being able to see the ones each side - the personal data thing.

I've seen the redaction leap up AND down, and seen it leap two lines.

Of course that lets us see things we are not supposed to. If you report the page, FindMyPast should be able to tweak it. Not sure what Ancestry do.

[chris_49]

I come across this a lot. I always thought it was a photographic issue.

It's a bit of a bonus because the blanked-out detail on ther unredacted person should be given on the transcript, but you're also given a bit of info on the redacted person that might be useful confirmation, like a DoB or in this case an occupation that tells you that the person is almost certainly male.

.... and from the DoBs should not have been redacted anyway
 

[Andrew Tarr]

Perhaps an expert on here can explain how the redacting is done?  I can't believe it has all been done manually by people with reels of thin black tape.  So it has been done electronically.  I guess the system 'knows' where to start and end each solid line, and if that gets out of kilter it has been told not to go diagonally but jump up or down somewhere in between?  The text on top doesn't make the jump, so it seems unintentional.

EDIT  -  thinking about it, there's no point telling a system any more than the start of each row of data that needs redacting.  It just mistakes the end of the row, either up or down one line (maybe even two lines), joining them up as described.    A clumsy kind of OCR, I assume.

[Mart 'n' Al]

Andrew, that is what I thought. I can't understand what could have gone wrong. I certainly won't be reporting it.

(Do family historians have a different attitude to data protection, I wonder?) Discuss.

Martin

[andrewalston]

It's a bit annoying at times, but you can glean info about the accidentally-revealed people.

In this case, Alice Hopwood ought to have been hidden, and Benjamin Parrot ought to be visible. You can still find out about Benjamin from the transcription, but if you are looking into the Hopwood family you know that Alice was at home, but not her date of birth.

[Mart 'n' Al]

Andrew, I should clarify one thing.  I wasn't actually looking at the data on that page, I just noticed the oddity.

Martin

[Mean_genie]

The black lines were added electronically (so they can be removed individually as records are opened) and could be made to 'curve' to follow the lines in books that were tightly-bound, causing the scanned image to be distorted, especially near the fold. Most of the time this worked as it was meant to, but where there are mistakes the pages can look pretty weird!