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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: HughC on Saturday 26 May 12 11:35 BST (UK)
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Every time the probate calendar states that a person's last address was in "the county of Anglesea" -- which must be a few hundred thousand individuals by the name of Jones alone -- the Ancestry transcript tells us the place of death was "Anglesey, Staffordshire, England". I suppose one or two could have died while visiting relatives in the English midlands, but not the entire population of the island, surely?
We could be charitable and put it down to lack of geographical knowledge (Mesopotamia in Rutland is another example), but the censuses have apparently been transcribed by either a kindergarten class or the inmates of a lunatic asylum. Another possibility is criminals awaiting execution, who had nothing to lose by sabotaging the system. Cheap labour, either way, but at what a price!
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Probably cheap Indian labour!! ::) ::)
And we all know about Call Centres based in India?!?! ;D
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This sounds like an echo of the transcribed WW1 records which put so many of the France and Flanders deaths as occurring in Aldershot.
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Anglesey is actually in Staffordshire, it is a parish to the south of Burton on Trent. ;D
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There maybe an area in Staffordshire called Anglesea.
In the Irish Sea there is a very large island called Ynys Mon or Anglesey. It has been there all my long life and for thousands of years before ;D
I appreciate all those who have transcribed hundreds of PR's etc, which allow me in part, even a small one, to do some looking up, but perhaps the people who are transcribing census etc should have geography lessons before they start. Having said that, I wonder how many ordinary people on here would know that Portmadoc or Porthmadog would know that it was in the 1800's known as Ynyscynhaiarn !!!! So I forgive some of the mistakes.!!!!
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The place in Staffordshire is Engelsea, usually called Engelsea Brook. There is a famous Methodist Chapel there which has book sales, cb
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It's the way you tell them. ;)
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Here's another from the probate calendars:
"... who died at Hôtel de l'Ermitage, Costebelle near Hyères, France ..."
And Ancestry transcribe that as
Death Place: London, England.
One wonders how many years of geography lessons would be needed to get through to people who can perpetrate that sort of thing.
Perhaps we should start a new thread (or even a competition):
my weirdest find on the Ancestry web site.
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Nearly every page of the 1911 census for Wales have errors in the transcripts. I think that this was the first census that the people of Wales were allowed to fill the forms in Welsh . I have a sneaky feeling that a lot of them used that "privilege" to confuse the enumerators. But it does make interesting reading.
Some of them did not admit to knowing English, my nain for one, and she was fluent in both English and Welsh.
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>> to confuse the enumerators <<
The spirit lives on. Go into a village shop or post office in Wales, and the conversation will immediately switch to Welsh to exclude the stranger. I longed to be able to tell them I'm not a mochyn saesneg: I'm celtic swine like you. But I never got beyond lesson one.
Of course we're all foreigners really -- almost everywhere in the world.
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Then there are all those who died in France and Flanders having Theatre of War = Aldershot :-\
>> to confuse the enumerators <<
The spirit lives on. Go into a village shop or post office in Wales, and the conversation will immediately switch to Welsh to exclude the stranger. I longed to be able to tell them I'm not a mochyn saesneg: I'm celtic swine like you. But I never got beyond lesson one.
Of course we're all foreigners really -- almost everywhere in the world.
Reminds me of a couple of friends in the mid 1960's going into a shop in mid Wales at the height of the troubles that many Welsh were having with English people buying up cottages for holiday homes.
The two women inside never stopped talking - Welsh of course - the girls bought what they wanted and as they got to the door to leave one of the girls turned back and told these two Welsh women- in fluent Welsh - that they should be careful what they say about their customers as they could lose custom that way.
What the two women didn't know was that my friend had Welsh grand=parents and had grown up speaking the language even though she lived all her life in England and had an English accent.
Jean
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I can remember that happening in north wales inthe 1970's. No disrespect intended but i suspect most people are use to that happening all round the country now.
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Jean,
I can almost cap that story. Years ago I worked with a chap whose family had moved from North Africa to France and later to England. He looked European: possibly his ancestors were not in fact Arabs, but anyway his elder brother still remembered Arabic from his childhood.
The said brother was once travelling with his wife in one of those old Southern Region trains with no corridor: each compartment had its own door on each side of the carriage. Sitting opposite them were two Arabs in full regalia who started making unsavoury remarks about his wife. "Nice bit of stuff: I could do her some damage if I had a chance" -- that sort of thing.
To his credit he said nothing. His wife didn't understand the lingo, anyway. When they reached their station and stepped onto the platform he turned round in the doorway and, in perfect Arabic, wished them a pleasant onward journey. Their faces fell when they realized he must have understood every word they were saying. Much more effective revenge than making a scene!
Just shows: never assume you're safe speaking a language you think those around you won't understand (unless perhaps it's Navajo and you're in Japan).
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We could be charitable and put it down to lack of geographical knowledge (Mesopotamia in Rutland is another example) ............
I don't know about Rutland, but there's Mesopotamia and Jericho in the city of Oxford - that's the Oxford in Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Not to be confused with any other Oxford.
Sometimes these unlikely place names turn out to be kindasorta rightish, so I've got into the habit of checking via Google etc before assuming they're all bonkers. Although it often turns out that they are.
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Thanks, Carol, for bringing back distant memories of punting on the Cherwell and rowing on the Isis. Oh, my misspent youth! Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad? That cured me of Nescafé for life.
Anyway, this particular twixt-the-rivers was, specifically, Ctesiphon, where he was killed in action in 1915. The editors of Burke's Landed Gentry evidently didn't believe there was such a place and "corrected" it to Cresiphon. Perhaps that should be a lesson to us, as you say, not to assume everything that looks wrong is necessarily bonkers -- though in the case of Ancestry it usually is.
And I promise never to confuse my alma mater or its home city with any other place, be it in Akron, Ohio, or anywhere else in the world.
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wee hugh, i agree with you that's the best revenge. I was with a load of nurse specialist and they were doing a masters course and lowly staff nurse that i was had paid to do the module. They rubbed it in a few times how hard fourth level was and i 'd heard little bits of conversation on what they were on about. I had done an ou degree. I turned round and asked what they were calling hard and they rattled on about a topic. I said oh you meann....I got asked how i knew and turned round and told them it was second level ou!
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Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad?
Sadly, no. But don't you mean the Cadena?
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Does the aroma of roasting coffee at Carwardine's still waft up Cornmarket to the Broad?
Sadly, no. But don't you mean the Cadena?
Sloe Gin - that's exactly what I was about to say ::)
And wee Hugh - if Burke's can get it wrong, what hope is there for us common folk :o
Btw I'm 'town' rather than 'gown', so my youth was misspent in the pursuit of less esoteric pleasures. Woolie's caff and the Fantasia were more my style. All gone now. Happy days.
Carol
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Do I mean the Cadena? I forget. They do say it's the short-term memory that goes first, and this was no more than 45 years ago (yes, the '68 generation of revolting students). Events before about 1880 are no problem.
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Some time ago I worked for a government agency that had a Welsh Office. They always answered the telephone in Welsh. This frustrated one of my colleagues to such an extent that one day he decided to ask his question in his native Polish lanuage. However he was soon put in his place as the woman he was speaking to immediately answered his question in Polish.
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My wife spent most of the first 4 years of her life in Germany (family in the Army!).
She had been working in Luxembourg, IT Help Desk & Support, for a few years, for a UK company.
Then the company "merged" with a German company.
In contrast to the Dutch, Austrian, Italian (etc.) people who phoned in, the Germans were reluctant to speak in English.
There was a lot of muttering on one phone call.
Ending the call, my wife pointed out that, although she couldn't talk in German, she recognised enough profanities and bad words, and that perhaps a more civil tongue would get a better response?! ;D
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Well according to a commercial website with family history as its goal... Sydney in New South Wales WAS in the 19th century in AUSTRIA..... I along with many others have regularly advised them that Sydney NSW is in AUSTRALIA but they seem reluctant to alter their database... so I guess 'It's official Sydney NS Wales was in Austria BUT is now in Australia .... I blame climate change for the geographical movement from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern'
Cheers JM from NS Wales (as in how NSW BDM 19th C recorded New South Wales)
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Yes, some people seem incapable of telling those two countries apart. I vaguely remember a story a few years ago about someone hoping to hear the Vienna Boys' Choir while attending the Olympic Games in ... oh, some city in NS Wales, I think.
Is it global warming, or perhaps continental drift? Oz really is moving north-east at the rate of a couple of centimetres a year. Won't be long now before it collides with California.
Ancestry has such blind faith in its transcribers that it never corrects anything. If you're lucky it may add what it's pleased to call an alternate (meaning alternative, which is not the same thing at all). But the original version remains for all time, however obvious the idiocy.
Evidently recruits have to undergo rather drastic brain surgery before they can start work.
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I have also heard stories of people booking flights to Sydney NSW and discovering they were actually booked for Sydney Nova Scotia, but I doubt that can be laid at the feet of Ancestry. ;D