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Position:Home>Genealogy> Who on EARTH was paid to transcribe the 1911 census?Question: Who on EARTH was paid to transcribe the 1911 census!? Have you been using it,,, have you noticed the spelling and mistakes, they are almost too many to report
so far I have a Mr Henry!.!.!.!. instead of Henry!.!.!.!.!. Arther instead of Arthur Camberwall instead of Camberwell Wood carner instead of wood carver amry instead of mary and so it goes on, BUT its costing me ￡3!.60 a go!!Www@QuestionHome@Com Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Agree !. I choose transcripts simply because it is cheaper !. This is not the only place where horrendous interpretations appear in record transcripts !. The Scottish census returns from 1841 to 1901 on the ancestry!.co!.uk site are transcripts as Scotlands People has the exclusive use of the digitised images !. They are riddled with similar anomalies !. " Horse joiner " for house joiner is but one ! The IGIs are another !. Could go on but ---- !Www@QuestionHome@Com I think they must have scanned it into a computer!. Surely no human being could be that lacking in common sense!? A relative with the surname Badcock has, rather sinisterly, come out as Badevil!. They've also somehow managed to conflate my great-grandfather's entry with my great-aunt's entry, so we have a 77-year-old man called Theodora! Maud Peters becomes Mand Poters, Margaret becomes Mragaret, etc!. The worst thing is that their search engine doesn't seem to do soundex, so unless you can guess how they've misspelt your family, you can't even find them!. Still, mustn't grumble - it has been really helpful, warts and all!.Www@QuestionHome@Com Some of it may not be the fault of the transcriber!. I have not checked out the English census records, but I have seen the photocopies of the US and Canadian, and names were not spelled the way we spell them, in many cases, in the original documents!. My great-grandfather was a Bailey!. It is spelled Bailey, Baily, Bagley, or Baley depending on the original record I'm looking at!.Www@QuestionHome@Com As far as I am aware no one gets paid to do it,they ask for volunteers to transcribe these census forms!.Having looked at a great many the writing in a lot of cases is illegible & at that time ink was used which used to run or bleed into the paper!.Together with all that the standard of education in those days was extremely poor to say the least!.Many of the people themselves had little or no education & were unable to write their own names so could not tell the person filling in the forms how to spell them!. Remember schooling was mainly for people with money & most were out at work from the age of 10 or 12 years old,in the UK,schooling stopped at the age of 14 for ordinary folk well into the 1900's!.Added to all this a lot of damage was done to a lot of census forms through damp or water damage in different places!.But I will agree that some of the transcribers do not appear to make much effort into correctly identifying a lot of people,I have myself sent in a lot of corrections as I am a member of Ancestry and some of the mistakes are ridiculous!.Www@QuestionHome@Com |