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

[SarahND]

Just finally got an email from Ancestry announcing their new additions, including the Scotland 1851 & 1861. Part of the blurb says,

Just added to Ancestry are the 1851 and 1861 Scotland Census records. They chronicle a time when census forms were distributed to households before the census night, and collected in the morning. All responses reflected where the individuals physically stayed that night, and their own handwritten answers, making these census records an accurate snapshot of the time.

This makes it sound like the forms available contain the actual handwriting of the people in each house, which is certainly not the case? All the ones I have are the same handwriting all down the page from household to household. Are the images we get from SP copied from the individual handwritten documents which were then distroyed? If so, surely these are the ones that the OCR is reading and not each household's bit of paper. Acccuracy does not seem to be Ancestry's strong point these days. Although there is just enough ambiguity in the statement above for them to be able to wiggle out of it legally if need be. They certainly wouldn't say it if they offered the actual images.

I do use Ancestry on a daily basis, so obviously find enough that is useful to me, but I do wish they would be more accurate. At least, I hope they are gradually having humans check the OCR output that they so prematurely put up on their site. I am glad to have at least something up for the 1851 and 1861 though-- it has obviously helped a number of people. But it should be kept free of charge until it has been checked. Not that it will help me, since I already have paid for the year's subscription! But new subscribers should not be promised accuracy... yet.

Regards,
Sarah

[DavidWW]

.....snipped...........
Just added to Ancestry are the 1851 and 1861 Scotland Census records. They chronicle a time when census forms were distributed to households before the census night, and collected in the morning. All responses reflected where the individuals physically stayed that night, and their own handwritten answers, making these census records an accurate snapshot of the time.

This makes it sound like the forms available contain the actual handwriting of the people in each house, which is certainly not the case? All the ones I have are the same handwriting all down the page from household to household. Are the images we get from SP copied from the individual handwritten documents which were then distroyed? If so, surely these are the ones that the OCR is reading and not each household's bit of paper. Acccuracy does not seem to be Ancestry's strong point these days. Although there is just enough ambiguity in the statement above for them to be able to wiggle out of it legally if need be. They certainly wouldn't say it if they offered the actual images.

.....snipped.............

And they can't even get the process right!

Yes, the enumeration books "reflect" the Heads' of Household handwriting on the Schedules which were handed back to the enumerator (except that the enumerator sometimes filled in the form for them), but the enumerator engrossed (luverly old Scots word, that) i.e. transcribed the information from the schedules to the enumeration book, and some time soon after that the individual household schedules were destroyed.

In other words, what you are seeing is the enumerator's handwriting. OK, and striving to the utmost to be fair, it could be said that this will reflect the handwriting in the individual schedules from the point of view of ease or otherwise of interpretation, but I don't think that's what's meant.



David

[Mr_P]

One bizzare result I found when I took advantage of the free days was that I got "Dundee, Glasgow" as the birthplace of several of a family I was looking for.

I got the image from ScotlandsPeople tonight and what Ancestry had done was take two separate birthplaces for the two people directly above 'my' lot and join them together because Person one's birthplace was Glasgow, Person Two's Dundee (slightly to the right of the Glasgow above it) and then my folks have two sets of double quotes to indicate that it's Dundee again for the next few entries.

Now that amalgamation is obvious to me, but might not be to those who have Scottish ancestors but are learning about Scotland's places for the first time. If it had been done to two places I wasn't familiar with - somewhere in Ireland for example - then I could have wasted time later searching for somewhere that didn't exist! I hope that hasn't happened to any actual names or professions either, that would be really worrying.

To give them some credit I did manage to track down some elusive and completely mis-spelt relatives that I hadn't found on ScotlandsPeople - being able to search on address and so on is really useful.

Cheers,

Paul