[or-roots] more census whining

[Leslie Chapman]

I guess I should mention one that I found after my initial whine yesterday;

On HQ

Surname  GivenName  Age  Sex  Race  Birthplace  State  County  Location
Year
HOLTE  HENRY  50  M  W  WI  WI  WAUKESHA  MERTON  1900

Since that is such a simple name and short I was puzzled why I couldn't find
him in the index, so I resorted to the age group / sex / birthplace sort and
there he was with an extraneous "e" so I figured, it was a poor image like
Mr Frilner I mentioned or the jerks that scribble all over the page caused
the confusion, but no, Holt a clear break before the next character which is
a 5 I believe.

So where did the extra e come from? was it just a typo? Was that the way a
Holte that whoever created the index knew spelled their name?

One thing I am not clear on with respect to Heritage Quest; somewhere I got
the idea they are indexed based on the original government index and that
they don't do any checking unless you complain and they really don't care
unless the index is not working at all. I did manage to find a venue to
complain, but didn't have sense enough to log the problem before I went
looking for a place to complain.

my favorite oddity was the census in 1881 in Canada where a whole block got
taken twice, or at least written up twice, this wasn't just a duplication
because some of the information was different, but the same block shows up
twice in the census.

I still have the hardest time with my peopel who supply bogus answers
though. The couple where the wife ages twice as fast as the husband or the
family I found a few weeks back who I had to really study them to convince
myself they were the same people. Almost all of the children had different
names ten years later and I only accepted I had the same people when I
realized almost all of the given names in the first census matched their
middle initial ten years later. Then there is my neices ancestors who simply
gave very different information every year in which nothing really matched
up except the numbers fo children.

Isn't it FUN!

Les