We’ve just done a big upgrade to the civil births maps, adding the 8 years 1914 to 1921, to match the civil deaths and marriages already covering those years. So three cheers, claps on the back, pints of shamrock all round. Except …
I thought the hair-raising LDS death and marriage transcriptions were the limit. No they weren’t.
Jhonston 1920
Johnnston 1915
Johnsron 1916
Johnstin 1914
Johsnton 1920
Or try:
Mujphy 1917
Murphu 1917
Murpjy 1921
Murpny 1915
Murpyy 1916
A number of demons are in play. First, from 1914 to 1918 many of the civil servants running the registration system were away at war. Those who took over seem to have had poor literacy skills, to put it kindly. Then from 1918 to 1921, came the War of Independence, with continual sabotage of all the existing (British) systems of administration, including the civil registration system. So there are plenty of good reasons why your ancestors’ birth, marriage or death might not be there.
However, in the case of birth records from about 1911, there also seems to have been a bit of a breakdown in the transcription system used by IrishGenealogy. MAH MT KVAX born in Belfast in 1920? I don’t think so. If you look at the original, the child was May McKeag.
The only way a transcriber could have produced this is by trying to type with their head instead of their fingers. Banging their forehead off the keyboard, in other words.
Whoever that poor suffering transcriber was, they left a trail of anguish: VUFARU MT TONNVLL; TACYVRZNV MAYONH ; BAMDVL ZRFZN.
The problems seem to be specific to IrishGenealogy births from about 1911 to 1921, so if you’re not finding a birth that should be there in that period, sweat other sources – FamilySearch, Rootsireland, the Northern Ireland GRO, even the printed indexes in the Dublin GRO search room.
Bamdvl Zrfzn, long-lost scion of the Irwins, I feel your pain.
Wow, and I though it was bad having some census records with first and last names reversed! Do you know roughly how many records have been randomised like this?
I have transcriptions for all 30,000 BMD records for Mourne in south Down, and I’ve standardised all the name spellings, and never came across random letters like that. But then, if they randomised the registration area as well, I wouldn’t have captured those records…
Looks like OCR gone rogue.
Your most hilarious yet. And that’s saying something
It’s clear they did not follow up with a sampling of the output of the transcription output of the scanning software they used. I can only wonder how frequent corrections are needed for the output.
Always examine the original document!
I am imagining a cat walking across the keyboard. Probably bad OCR. Blind trust in technology goes awry again
John
Thank you for this insight. As you rightly state, 1914 – 1918, & 1921, the young transcribers went to war, replaced by the older generations, who presumably being born 1850+, would have been illiterate.
My grandfather, CID DALIN, was transcribed as CIEL SPATIN in the 1940 U.S. Census. Needless to say, it took me awhile to find him.
It seems a computer may have gone rogue on the transcriptions, or else someone was playing with simple ciphers. Those weird transcriptions started off correct, but have all had many of their letters substituted, eg E becomes V, and so on. They can all be translated back quite easily, because they’ve all had the same substitutions.
Clearly the annual herding of cats went across the transcriber’s keyboard!
Thos transcriptions are bizarre but there were also some more mundane errors that affected people for their whole life. Someone during the registration of my mother’s birth in 1919 the clark wrote Marg (possibly as an an accepted abbreviation) and stopped there. She had been christened Margaret but the Marg was later interpreted as Mary and so she then had an “Official” name and also one that she was known by. It caused difficulties including having to sit her Primary cert twice and twords the end of her life, being addressed by an unfamiliar name in hospitals and other settings adding to her confusion at the time.