1851 & 1861 Scottish Censuses on Ancestry.com today ....

[DavidWW]

Hi all

I wondered if a grocer would only get that designation if he actually exchanged goods for cash.
......snipped..............Russell

i.e. he had a wee shop and sold golds over the counter, as opposed to trading in goods, exporting/importing, etc.

Why he wasn't called a shopkeeper, I know not, - maybe that wasn't in the list of allowable occupations provided to enumerators.

David

[Jean Jeanie]

Bertha

So pleased for you

It'great when a big brick wall comes tumbling down.

This Free Ancestry thing is great.

I now have 15 1851/1861 censuses, for free, which would have cost £18 on SP.

To be honest they are very much side lines and I would not have even considered looking for them on SP, however it is still very interesting to find out where they were and who was with them!!!!

Jean

[Russell]

Hi David

A distinction I have noticed is that the term 'grocer' was most often applied if the person actually owned the business. The term shop assistant appears to be a much more recent innovation. An employee was generally a shop worker, or message boy/girl until the 1901 census certainly and possibly 1911 (we'll know in a year or ten!)
I reckon that the Great War creating more female shop employees, as well as other jobs, probably created a range of new titles for various occupations.

Just speculation but, hopefully, reasonably informed speculation

Russell

[Thrall]

Hi all and thanks for the pointer to Ancestry though it took a hiccup to get through on the right page. Anyway, the search machine, while giving wondrous (getting near to Christmas?) spellings, does give lists of "place of birth" which makes all the difference with a frequent name in Glasgow, but born somewhere exotic.(Boston USA)
And yes I found gr.grandfather now after much expensive searching on SP. His father is not evident, but two other brothers............ To conclude matters, I think a print out from SP is the only way to go, having first found the culprit, guilty as sin hiding away, but did he know it, easily enough found on Ancestry.
One slight deviation from the norm, is that the three brothers get a new mother, same surname, but the old one is still alive and died thirty years later. No hubby, but he was a plasterer journeyman, and could be anywhere, Scotland, or USA.
Is a tree ever "complete"?.........

Guid hunting,

Thrall

[DavidWW]

The above and another similar example mean that I'm now 99+% certain that OCR software was involved.

(The other one is "Retined Mershonat & Acculine Of 10 Acres Of Land" for "Retired Merchant & feuar & occupier of 10 acres of land".)

In both cases, the similar length of entry in the occupation field had to be squeezed in as two lines of writing in the space normally occupied by one, so that the size of the script is literally tiny.

For a human being, nae prob, just magnify it, and both were perfectly clear, but I suspect, - I'm not certain by any means, - that magnification doesn't help so much with OCR software.

The human eye and brain largely ignore the increased amount of "white space" from the magnification, but OCR software won't and will tend to produce even more bizarre interpretations.

While I'm very pleased about the search options possible on the three Scottish censuses that are available on Ancestry, the use of OCR for '51 and '61 is a pain in that it means that previously developed wildcard strategies are most often not going to be as helpful.

David

[sporran]

Hello all,


the indexing by Ancestry has caused much amusement with English and Welsh censuses long before they turned to Scotland. However, I am certain that indexing is done by humans and OCR is not to blame. It would appear that little or no training takes place and quality-control is missing.

OCR has been used for a long time with special characters, such as those printed on the bottom of cheques, and it is becoming more successful with typewritten fonts. PDAs (hand-held computers) also use OCR but generally they have to "learn" a person's writing and the person must write each character separately. The technology used in Palm Pilots seemed better than the Compaq PDA that I formerly used, where anything other than Ladybird-style letters caused problems. Even the best OCR software will have severe problems with cursive handwriting; and lots of lines, such as on census forms, would add to the woe.

If OCR were any good with handwriting, it would be used. As FreeBMD puts it, with my apologies for the dreadful conversion of an acronym into a verb:
"Handwritten records
No-one thinks that OCRing handwritten records is feasible."


Regards,

John

[DavidWW]

Hello all,


the indexing by Ancestry has caused much amusement with English and Welsh censuses long before they turned to Scotland. However, I am certain that indexing is done by humans and OCR is not to blame. It would appear that little or no training takes place and quality-control is missing.

OCR has been used for a long time with special characters, such as those printed on the bottom of cheques, and it is becoming more successful with typewritten fonts. PDAs (hand-held computers) also use OCR but generally they have to "learn" a person's writing and the person must write each character separately. The technology used in Palm Pilots seemed better than the Compaq PDA that I formerly used, where anything other than Ladybird-style letters caused problems. Even the best OCR software will have severe problems with cursive handwriting; and lots of lines, such as on census forms, would add to the woe.

If OCR were any good with handwriting, it would be used. As FreeBMD puts it, with my apologies for the dreadful conversion of an acronym into a verb:
"Handwritten records
No-one thinks that OCRing handwritten records is feasible."


Regards,

John

Hi John

Repeating my response on a parallel thread ........

See Sally's post re the www reference that she found in relation to proven use by Ancestry of OCR and allied technology ........

This reinforces my belief on the basis of many '51 and '61 entries that I have now seen, that however untrained the personnel, be they in the Indian sub-continent or SE Asia; however deficient their lack of knowledge of the English language and never mind Scottish names, place and personal; however deficient the lack of training; however lacking the provision of lookup tables for occupations, locations, and surnames; and however lacking the quality control procedures involved, it verges on the extremely unlikely that many of the 1851 and 1861 census entries on Ancestry could have been produced other than by a method involving in some manner OCR technology.

That's not to say that previous inanities in earlier English datasets available on Ancestry weren't the result of untrained, unsupervised human beings, most probably furth of the UK, with no proper QC procedures !!

David

[sporran]

Hello all,


I sent a question to Ancestry before posting my thoughts yesterday. Their reply was received a short time ago:

Dear John,

We appreciate your message.

We have a team of humans that transcribe the records.

If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know.

Justin W
Member Solutions
Ancestry.com


Regards,

John

[Bertha]

John

At least you got a reply. I e-mailed them 2 days ago re my missing Ross's in the 1851 but no reply. I had a look for other's on the same page without any luck so beginning to think someone turned over 2 pages!
I have even tried putting the names in as they are entred eg Rob for Robert, Cath for Catherine etc and no surname, my eyes are getting sore looking.
Still better make use of the free viewing whilst it lasts, don't know if its worth buying a membership though
Regards to all
Bertha

[Jack]

We have a team of humans that transcribe the records.

Hi John,
If that reply to you is true - and i've no reason to doubt it is,
then it certainly doesn't look like English is their 1st language, and that quality control is non-existent.
--
Many companies know of the moneymaking aspect of the fast growing genealogy industry.
And have jumped on the bandwagon.
Just churning out old records, either online or CD, with no care whatsoever if there are transcription errors.
--
Accuracy? Sorry, you've lost me. What's that?
Checking? Eh? You've got me there too. Never heard of it.
--
Jack (who needs a wee cynical Smiley)