Genealogy Forum UK

So I was trying to pin down a Heath, did a look through the England & Wales, FreeBMD Marriage Index, 1837-1915 , and came across a page that was riddled with errors, including the original author who miss-spelt a few names and repeated them underneath with a variant of the spelling. please see the image below, I did not see forum rules, so linked to photobucket, this is a 1000pixel wide image

http://i1273.photobucket.com/albums/y41 ... 1cc581.jpg

The digital transcription, well what can I say, was this done with a text reader? If manual input then I guess someone had overdosed on the addiction of transcription and had become text blind after transcribing for 20 hours without a break, or they were a novice at reading older style script. Whatever the reason, there is no excuse for the uncertainty displayed in these entries, the numbers are all easy to read and the name Pierre is obvious.

This is a superb example to show people as to why the people they are looking for may appear to be "missing", they are there, but the poor transcriptions mean they never show up, that is where learning how to search is important.

If any of you want to copy this to use in any talks or whatever, please feel free but I would be please if you mentioned me!

After lunch I think I am duty bound to correct these.
Edit:
Also note that Poor old Hearley has been left out altogether, being given the same name as the previous entry, Charles. So a perfect example as to why someone who is looking for their relation will never have found his marriage entry just based on his name search.

The data is from 1865 Q2.

I searched for ages looking for my Mums enrty. That was transcribed wrong and was in 1941.
The index you see were collect at the time from local register offices, then transcribed for the index.
Also too church records the vicor added also show problems getting them mixed up too in Parish records!
Human errors...

I have transcribed many records for the frre bmd/reg/cen
And a lot now are much better scans to read from than they we were. So dont be too hard on who transcibes. But is always worth searching using * as you can or soundex.
Jo

Oh sure, i understand the original transcription work may have been as good as it could have been, but as you say, the copies have vastly improved and maybe easier to read, which begs the question why are Ancestry.com still using out of date databases, sure they initially would have paid to use the databases, but with the amount of money they make they can easily employ an army of transcribers to create thier own databases with more accurate data.

My initial reason for this post was to highlight what new people are up against when they use Ancestry.com and to an extent other providers of this data and why it is more often the case than not, they they fail to find a relative and give up.