On Tuesday, I posted Bingo! (and a few lessons learned). The long and the short is that I finally found my grandfather in the 1930 census. He was indexed as Jack Isbill, when in actuality it should have been Jack Cahill.
I submitted corrections to his record and the others in the family. Today, I got emails from Ancestry saying that they had added the correction and it was now available in the searches.
I’m impressed that the turnaround time was only a few days. I’m also impressed that this option is available so as to help others in their searches. I strongly encourage everyone to submit corrections anytime you find something indexed incorrectly.
Great post!!! I have found numerous mistakes on ancestry and will begin to send in the corrections. Thanks!
I’ve done this quite a bit when finding incorrect originals or transcriptions for various ancestors, and Ancestry does always get back to you (some corrections take a little longer for a response). And there is one tremendous potential payoff – when people researching the same family get in touch with one another. I’ve contacted people who have made corrections and vice versa, and this avenue for finding other researchers has so far been one of the most productive. For one family I learned why a particular daughter was so hard to find – she had divorced her husband, taken the kids, and changed all their names back to her maiden name!
Not only have I corrected names, I have also taken the time to also put in the maiden name, or corrected maiden name. That helps people a lot!
I agree whole-heartedly to submitting corrections and it’s a very important step, and I agree as Greta mentioned – the added payoff of making new ‘cousin’ connections, and it helps others. I’ve submitted many MANY corrections to ancestry and I’ve always received a reply in a couple days or so. HOWEVER, I always thought that there was a “human element” to the corrections – NOT TRUE!! I submitted a correction to a LEEMING houshold in the 1901 England census – incorrectly indexed as LEEMINY. They changed the entire household to LEEMING, when in fact there were a son-in-law and married daughter and granddaughter living in the home, one of which WAS indexed incorrectly. To my surprise they also added the LEEMING name to ALL of those records – at this point i attempted to submit a second correction… they entered CORRECTION as the last name on the family.. I honestly thought that someone would see that – lesson learned. I don’t think any actual eyes look at the corrections submitted, which to me is a problem in some cases.