Yes, there are quotes around that…
The Legal Genealogist couldn’t believe it.
Simply could not believe that any genealogist could have done such a thing.
It just had to be an April Fool’s joke.
I mean, I know that online family trees can be problematic, but seriously?
How could anyone who’s done research into American families for more than a nanosecond have taken a woman who spent her entire life in the American South from her birth around 1830 to her death after the 1900 census — and say that this rural southern woman would have died in Iran?
Looking at that index entry, trying to find a death date for my third great grand-aunt Hattie Elizabeth (Battles) Cranford, I was flabbergasted.
And then I found the next family tree.
It didn’t say she died in Iran.
It said she was born in Iran.
Really?
Iran?
How could these genealogists be making such a mistake?
Answer: they weren’t.
And I can’t really blame Ancestry here either.
Take a look at the entries.
You can see the problem, right?
Sigh…
It’s one of ambiguity.
To an American, of course, trained for more than a half-century by the Postal Service to use two-letter abbreviations for states, “Al” is Alabama.1
In the bigger world, however, “Al … is a village in Kardeh Rural District, in the Central District of Mashhad County, Razavi Khorasan Province, Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 370, in 107 families.”2
Guess which one Ancestry uses?
Alabama works fine. The three-letter abbreviation “Ala” works fine. Al puts us on the other side of the globe in a tiny village with fewer than 400 residents.
And oh — by the way — her brother Azariah Battles, who died in 1862 while serving in the Confederate Army? He really didn’t die in Civil, Sud, Haiti, either.3
Ah, the “joys” of ambiguity…
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “The joys of ambiguity,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 1 Apr 2021).
SOURCES
- See “Our History: State Abbreviations,” About U.S. Postal Service (https://about.usps.com/ : accessed 1 Apr 2021). ↩
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Al, Iran,” rev. 11 Mar 2017. ↩
- The death date entry was, of course, “Civil War.” ↩
I have seen the same problem on Geneanet with my Italian ancestors. The person used the Italian postal code, but it matches a postal code in France, so all my Italian ancestors on his tree are all the from the Dordogne in France!!!!
Suddenly seeing this on FamilySearch indexed records with the wrong place name affecting all of the records in a set. Usually picking the wrong county and state for a city/town that’s the same name in both places. I’m worried something has happened to the overall process to keep introducing these errors. I can correct the record for my ancestor, but what about the rest?
I haven’t come across anything quite as bizarre as that on Ancestry, but one of the things that really irks me is when you do an all-categories search for possible records relating to a person whose date of birth you have carefully entered, restricting the filter to +/- 1 year of that date, only for the Ancestry algorithm to come back with a bunch of life events twenty or thirty years before the birth date. Fuzzy doesn’t begin to describe that kind of data matching.
In Find-a-Grave there was an entry for Strasburg, which is a town in Pennsylvania German central PA. The person had managed to twist that into Strasbourg, France.
I was born on Guam, Mariana Islands, right after WWII. “Mariana Islands” has been abbreviated “M.I.” since approximately forever. Ancestry has my ships passenger lists returning to mainland U.S. in 1949, abbreviated “M.I.” which Ancestry has dutifully transcribed as “MI” – Michigan. Sigh.
I guess it doesn’t have to be explained to someone who does Southern genealogy but the absolute #1 most common data entry error is Georgia the country instead of Georgia the state.
I’ve run into a version of this where the Swedish phrase “Okänd ort” – (meaning “unknown place”) – , has been enterred, and whatever system used then “knows” that “Ort” is a place in Germany… not very helpful.
Lots of errors on Ancestry and consequently passed on to other genealogical sites. Dates-well lots of issues there also. Would love to travel back in time and correct all the errors. And, what happened to all the family bibles passed down. Ugh. Sometimes I hesitate to even add folks to my tree with so many errors for which I don’t have answers.
Years ago I input the birthplace of my great grandparents as Zics, Somogy, Hungary, which I spelled it out just like this into Family Search. This week I got a email from Family Search saying that they found the birthplace of my great grandparents and when I looked it said Ilam, Iran. So Family Search is obviously having issues too.