Life Story on Ancestry

[Darwin]

Is there a glitch at the moment? I haven't had this happen before but the LifeStories on my people have gone bonkers and are changing all the places to other places in the world eg saying Devonshire, Bermuda instead of Devonshire or Devon England, even though in the facts it clearly says Devon, England. It's happening all over the place so all the Life Stories are now useless. I can change them manually but I can't do that to hundreds of profiles! I've used Ancestry for years and never had this happen before. Is this happening for anyone else and does anyone know how to stop it?

[HarryW]

Just looked at a random selection of my tree - all look OK.

[Darwin]

Thanks for the reply. Do you have world access or just UK & Ireland?

[Nanna52]

I’ve had that problem on and off for years.  Every now and again I recheck.  The best was my 2 times great grandparents who died in Bairnsdale, Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.  Suddenly they were in Trinidad and Tobago.  Son suggested I wait until Australia was playing cricket there and he would accompany me to visit. 

[HarryW]

UK and Ireland only.

I've never noticed a problem, even when I had worldwide access.

[Albufera32]

This may seem counter intuitive, but it is advice from Ancestry themselves.

Rather than typing in the full name manually, use the autofill drop down menus. Ancestry (the program) knows where those are and stores them correctly.

That said, I personally came across this particular piece of advice just recently (I have been binge watching videos by "The Barefoot Genealogist" Crista Cowan to find out about Ancestry DNA whilst waiting for my results) and at least for my main tree it is largely useless since the dropdown list includes numerous misspellings and truncated references from eg census transcriptions, as well as at least one typo of my own - Shotts Esat District instead of Shotts East District.

[Darwin]

Thanks for the replies. For a tree I'm working on now, I did try the drop down menu for Tiverton - it gave the choice of six different options so I chose Tiverton, Devon, England. The LifeStory has changed that to Tiverton, Cheshire, England. 

[Albufera32]

If I understand it correctly, and it is perfectly possible I don't, Ancestry is pre programmed, so to speak with a large number of locations that it knows, and particularly for the US will fill in the correct county for you as well. so if you pick one of those pre entered drop down options, it works perfectly. So far so good.

The problem is, it adds every location you type in, as well as any location that is read directly from a census (even mistranscriptions) to that drop down menu. Sadly, even if a location is added manually by you entirely accurately, Ancestry doesn't recognise that name, so will reset it to the closest match it can find in it's known list - in this case Tiverton, Cheshire, which it "knows" rather than Tiverton, Devon, which it doesn't.

It seems to me it would be much better if the program didn't keep adding to it's drop down menus, but only included the place names it actually recognises - after all, how can the user know the difference between "Tiverton, Devon, England" that is on the list because they typed it in full on a previous entry, and "Tiverton, Devon, England" which Ancestry knows and recognises?

My own personal favourite is when I carefully typed "Wishaw, Lanark, Scotland" and Ancestry changed it to  "Wishaw, Lanark, Scotland, Texas, USA"

[andrewalston]

They've obviously been making changes. Last time I looked, any address with a comma between the house number and the street name was converted to a random place in the USA.

They appear to have fixed that, so the ones I've looked at appear to be OK now. Where I specified England they now say England too.

I always specify the country, except for the two events which say "At Sea". I've been lucky that most of the country names in my trees have not changed, though there are Great War casualties in what is now Iraq. I don't think I've seen "Mesopotamia" in Ancestry's drop down lists!