Tip: Go Back and Check Any Locations You Added to People on Ancestry

Great to always take a gander at what is new and exciting over at Ancestry.

Ancestry has a Recently Added and Updated Collections section.


Occasionally they'll post one of the US Federal Censuses as being new or updated, and now that I'm combing through my tree I'm seeing that they do indeed correct previous indexing.

Ancestry has had the 1840 Census scanned and indexed for many years now, but I think they are continually improving the indexing.

For example, I added a location in Illinois for a likely cousin, Catherine (Patterson) Bushart, in the 1900 Census:

I think I added this location a few years ago.  The location was generated by the indexing at Ancestry, and apparently I didn't actually look at the census itself.  Bad genealogist, bad, because look at the next picture...

Look at what the actual image of the census says:

Yeah, that says Marrowbone Township in Moultrie County, Illinois.  Not Bethany village (although the enumeration district description is 0103: "Marrowbone Township, including Bethany Village"). ETA And look, there is Bethany Village written clearly below, showing yet another error on my part.  Sometimes I really get in my own way.

And even still, the index has now been updated to reflect the place "Marrowbone, Moultrie, Illinois", not even Marrowbone Township.

Thankfully Google still maps this accurately, but if there is a township AND town/village with the same name (but not in the same county) then the mapping functions for Google and Legacy can get confused.

The lesson I take from this is to look at what the census image says, not what the indexed entry says (that can change).

The 1900 Census seems especially prone to this kind of data entry error.




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