Years ago, when looking for my great-grandfather in WV in the 1870 census, I discovered a mistake in Ancestry.com's index for that census. The easiest way to show it to you is to tell you how to search for it. Go to Ancestry.com and choose the 1870 census database. In the "birth place" box, put in "Washington, USA". (Just do it!!) In the "lived in" or residence box, put in "West Virginia, USA". Come back here after you click on "search".
See how many hits you got? Since Washington didn't become a state until 1889, it is impossible that these folks were born there and we should not get any hits. If you flip through the hits pages, you'll find about 350 people living in rural Ritchie Co WV who were born in WA. Amazing. If, however, you look at the census images, you will find that what they actually say is these folks were born in "Virginia now WVa". OK, so the enumerator wasn't supposed to put that down, it should have just been "Virginia" but Ancestry.com doesn't improve anything by turning it into Washington.
These WV people were proud of their new state (formed 1863), were even passionate about it. They really did call it "West, by God, Virginia". I remember hearing that name for the state. I guess Ancestry.com just hired people to do their index who had little, if any, knowledge of US history. They apparently didn't know about the Civil War and how VA got split. Well, we've all heard that ignorance is no excuse. All of us, except maybe Ancestry.com
I told Ancestry about this problem about 8 or 9 years ago. Then, I naively thought they'd fix it and so forgot all about it. A few months ago, I had reason to call up that ancestor's 1870 census page and discovered that Ancestry had not fixed anything. I was and am furious. I'm going to quote my correspondence with them in its entirety, lest I mischaracterize it.
First, I called Ancestry's customer service line. It is really not worth quoting what happened except to note 2 things: 1) Apparently, customer service representatives are unable to search on Ancestry.com to find the page(s) you are talking about. That is definitely bad planning on their part and also faulty management. (I'm trying so hard to be nice!) 2) They gave me an email address which is supposed to be the place to write our complaints to, customersolutions@ancestry.com . So I sent them the following:
There is a mistake in your index for the 1870 census which affects hundreds of listed people. I found this first with West Virginia but have since noticed the problem is more widespread and more complicated. People are listed with a birth place of "Washington" but Washington didn't become a state until 1889, so this is impossible. In the WV entries, the census images actually say "Virginia now WVa" or "Va now WVa". In the Clay district of Ritchie Co WV, virtually everybody born before 1863 (when WV became a state) is listed in this way and indexed mistakenly as being born in Washington. There are hundreds of them. I guess the indexer had no idea about the history of the states and just saw a very long name and presumed it to be Washington. Anyway, it is wrong. I first told you about this 8 or 9 years ago but the problem still persists. In the last day or two, I have been trying to figure the extent of this problem and have seen instances where someone was living in MD or VA (and a few others elsewhere) who was noted on the census form as having been born in Washington but this certainly refers to the District of Columbia and not Washington state, so should be indexed as "District of Columbia". A few others are indexed as being born in Washington but the transcription mistake is something else. To see this problem, I suggest you do the following search: choose the 1870 census, do not enter a name, enter "Washington, USA" in the birth place spot, enter "West Virginia, USA" in the "living in" spot. This will give you all of the WV instances and after 35 pages, you will see the others from other locations.
Mistakes such as these should be corrected, not allowed to continue for years and years. I've been doing genealogy for over 20 years and so am not put off by mistakes but beginners get confused. They will see the "Washington" and think, "That cannot be my ancestor because mine was born in WV". Or, they will see the "Washington" and think, "Oh, that is where he was born. I never knew that." You keep advertising that doing genealogy is easy, all one has to do is enter a little info and you will do the rest. (This, of course, is altogether untrue.) If you don't correct your indexing mistakes, all you are doing is spreading misinformation. Maybe you don't care. I do.
I looked at the 1860 and 1850 censuses. In 1860, there are some who were born in the "Washington Territory" but you only put in "Washington". I think this is misleading as a huge percentage of beginners know little about American history and will not understand that this refers to a territory and not a state. Territorial records were different from state ones and those with ancestors born in territories need to learn this in order to find the info. In 1850, before there was even a Washington Territory, there are still some indexed as being born in Washington. One way or another, these are all wrong.
I'm going to keep a watch on this problem and if it doesn't get corrected in a reasonable period of time, I plan to blog about it and post on message boards and generally make a lot of noise. I've been an Ancestry.com subscriber for 10 years. I'm far enough back in my own family research that it is very rare that I find anything new and you don't have the deed/will/court record images I need. So, maybe I'll quit subscribing to your service. I don't know yet. If I do, I will be sure to tell everybody I encounter just why I quit. My New Year's resolution for this year is to make my voice heard and I intend to keep this resolution. -------Jo
End of 1st email.
I guess you are figuring that this blog post is my first attempt to make noise. It is.
Ancestry sent this reply:
March 21, 2012
Dear Jo,
Thank you for contacting Ancestry.com. We appreciate your feedback and are committed to providing excellent customer service.
We sincerely regret the frustrations you have experienced. Please send us the following so we may review your request:
The URL address where the information regarding birthdates listed in Washington state is found on our website.
URL stands forUniform Resource Locator, which is the technical name for an Internet address. The following are examples of URLs:
A URL merely specifies the location of an object on the Internet and is located at the top of your internet screen when you are viewing the information on the website.
If you have any questions regarding this or any other matters pertaining to our website, please contact us by responding to this email.
Sincerely,
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End of 2nd email.
You'll note they assumed I was too ignorant to know what a URL is, just as they seemed incapable of doing the search I had explained how to do. So, since they couldn't figure it out themselves, I sent them the URL in my reply.
From: Jo [mailto:strflwr213@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:22 PM
To: Ancestry.com Customer Service
Subject: Re: 1870 census mistake affecting hundreds of indexed names
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 10:22 PM
To: Ancestry.com Customer Service
Subject: Re: 1870 census mistake affecting hundreds of indexed names
This is the hit list for the search for born in Washington and living in West Virginia. The problem is in the index and so it shows up in the hit list. The actual images correctly note the birthplace which is not Washington state. After the first 2 on this hit list, you will find 300 or so in Ritchie County WV. In these, the birthplace on the image is "Virginia now WVa". Your index should list all of these as born in Virginia, not Washington which wasn't even a state when the people were born.
In my first email, I explained how to search for these mis-indexed entries. I don't understand why I need to send you the URL but here it is. -------Jo
End of 3rd email.
Their reply:
March 23, 2012
Dear Jo:
Thank you for contacting Ancestry.com. We appreciate your feedback and are committed to providing excellent customer service.
We apologize for the frustration you’ve experienced regarding errors in 1870 U.S. Federal Census. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have reported this error to our content team. Feedback from you, our valued customer, helps us correct errors and improve the website. Your patience and efforts to assist us in this matter are appreciated.
Please understand that while we receive a large volume of error submissions to our queue, they represent a very small percentage of the total number of records on Ancestry. Due to the volume of error submissions, fixes to errors on Ancestry are posted firstly in the order of those which affect the greatest number of users, and thereafter in the order in which they are reported. This also depends on employee resources. For this reason, there is no foreseeable timeframe as to when these changes will be made. We appreciate your patience.
There is an option that you can take as a member to receive the most immediate results. You can add a comment to the record online, or indicate a correction. These generally post much faster than those errors we report manually to our content team. The following help article contains instructions for you to do so if you wish:
Answer Title: How to add comments or indicate corrections
Answer Link: http://ancestryuk.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ancestryuk.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=668
If you have any questions regarding this or any other matters pertaining to Ancestry.com, please do not hesitate to contact us by either responding to this email or calling us at: 1-800-262-3787, M-F, 8-8 (MST).
Sincerely,
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End of 4th email.
There is no way I am going to go through 350 hits and correct the birth place. Actually, I tried to correct some of them and failed. Their correction box wouldn't give me the birth place spot to correct. Maybe it was having a bad day.
As of just a minute ago (12:21 AM EDT, 18 Jun 2012), Ancestry has not fixed the 1870 census index. I guess 350 people with heaven knows how many descendants is not enough people to warrant any effort from their correction team. One wonders what the correction team does if it doesn't do corrections. This is one problem they've known about for 8 years (at least). I think I could have done it manually with paper and pencil in a week or so. With a word processing program and find and replace, well you get the idea. We hear all of the time that actions speak louder than words. If this is true, I think we can say that Ancestry.com doesn't care much about accuracy which means they don't care much about genealogy and the people who do it. -------Jo
