RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => Topic started by: JosephusSapon on Friday 16 August 24 19:35 BST (UK)
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I don't know if this has already been brought to the board's attention, but I know I haven't seen it, so here goes.
In the Ancestry dataset: "England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2022" some of the dates are wrong. e.g. 2 March instead of 3rd February, 9 Nov instead of 11 Sep. The correct day/month numbers have been substituted somehow for the American month/day usage. I've no idea if this is throughout the relevant dates, but I've seen these two examples today. Be aware.
I imagine that in the first ingestion of the data all dates were converted to number/number form, and the subsequent indexing is where the fault lies. But it's Ancestry, so who knows.
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https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=883929.0
It has been discussed as part of the above thread.
Cheers
Ms_C
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noticed that too, is some not all and no idea how widespread.
Also applies to Ancestry's Scotland and Northern Ireland, Death Index, 1989-2022, both being GreyPower Deceased Data, compiled by Wilmington Millennium.
If the same death is on Findmypast is in UK format in England & Wales Deaths 2007-2024 / Ireland, Northern Ireland Deaths 1980-2024.
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Well, as we all know, Ancestry (USA owned) is really trying hard to convert us Brits to use their date formula. Not a chance with an old fogey like me.
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Me neither. Their date style is illogical.
Martin
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Well, as we all know, Ancestry (USA owned) is really trying hard to convert us Brits to use their date formula.
Is not that they are indexing mm/dd/yyyy their computer is converting 1st May to 5th January and as these are recent deaths after the end of the England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index 1916-2007 (and not all entries are affected in their incremental updates) you may have no idea that your distant cousin died January and not May as they indicate, unless you can find a death notice online elsewhere.
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Me neither. Their date style is illogical.
Completely. As a scientist YY/MM/DD makes the same sense as HH/MM/SS - larger unit before smaller. The only truly methodical system has been used in Scandinavia I believe - yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.ss, but that is really rather unwieldy.
One small (vaguely related) thing that always irritates (and saddens) me is the slavish way we Brits copy the stupid American distorted pronunciation of Kill-ometer. That word is part of a scientific series of measurement, but I suppose in time someone will start to say Sen-timeter or something ::)
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I am now wondering whether the American style of date came from Ireland. I have just been looking at an Irish Will Register which gives a date in the form "11mo 30 1876". I don't recall seeing anything like that before.
I once had a boss who decided to adopt dates as yy-mm-dd, following the Scandinavian idea, until someone replied to him along the lines of "Thank you for your letter of the 81st May 1921", after which he quietly ditched the idea.
All these Ancestry problems deserve a deluge of complaints. (They will not be reading this useful discussion.) This year, in a Society of Genealogists newsletter I came across the following in a list of recent additions to Ancestry. "The [1930s] one-quarter-inch scale map offers greater details of cities and villages, roads, railroads, and topographical information than the one-inch scale maps previously produced by the Ordnance Survey."
I wrote to them saying: "... that statement... must have been written by someone who has no understanding of map scales. A quarter-inch scale has detail approximating to a road atlas... the area of a map sheet is one-sixteenth of the equivalent sheets at one-inch scale.
"If people need a larger scale at that date, the OS was producing a six-inch to the mile scale or the 1:2500 scale. Both of these huge series have been uploaded by the National Library of Scotland on an excellent site so you don't need to bother... Also, we do not have any railroads in Britain."
Of course, there was no response!