Entering 1881 Scotland family from FindMyPast ?

As far as I can see Find my past calls the data: Piece, Folio and Page. Note that if they show the piece as 4 characters it is actually 3-1 so for example Piece: 1681 should be entered as 168-1.

So Volume/Registration district is Piece, Enumeration District is folio and page is page. This seems to be because they haven't bothered to change the results form to display the descriptions used on Scottish Census. In my own tree 98% of my Ancestors are NE Scotland so I've checked some of my census entries and this seems to match.

PS. I'd be extremely grateful if you could please refrain from making your posts bold and in a completely different font from the default forum font it only creates an extra job for forum staff to remove the extraneous font info. Many thanks in advance for your co-operation in this matter.

 

Alexander's quite right that the census references have been wrongly labelled at findmypast, and that 4 digit volume numbers should be entered as XXX-X

Unfortunately there are also a few three-digit volume numbers that should be entered in the XX-X format, and there's no simple way of knowing which (from memory they relate to the Glasgow area, but don't quote me on that).

There is a forthcoming newsletter article on this topic.

 

Attached is a spreadsheet of the full list of Scottish registration districts. They are numbered Geographically from the North to the South so the lower numbers refer to the far north. Where the district was split you got the -1, -2s etc. So central Aberdeen for example is St.Nicholas parish RD no 168. This became 168-1 and 168-2. The parishes with 2 digit numbers will be in the Highlands/Orkney. The parishes with single digit numbers are in Shetland. Glasgow area is all 500s.

Might it be possible to cross check these somehow?


Hmm I just did quote you but you know what I mean!

 

Thanks, Alexander - this list could be very useful.

Ideally what a findmypast user needs to know is whether the reference displayed on that site can be used as is, or needs modifying in some way. How do you think this could most easily be achieved?

(In an ideal world the LostCousins site would do all the work, but I don't think that's feasible in the near term; of course, in an even more ideal world findmypast would have followed the example set by FamilySearch, and then the problem wouldn't exist. Although there is a not dissimilar problem with Scotlandspeople......)

 

The Scotland's People references should be the definitive list after all that's the digital arm of the government department that created the source documents in the first place. The issue perhaps with the Scotland's People references is that the references follow the format used by the other archives eg: BMDs. Thus whilst they are quoted at the top of every image and shown on every they aren't explained or given titles. The references are just things like... "251/00 003/00 010" (see attached screenshot for how its presented to the user). Now this means RD:251 ED:3 Pg:10 but its not that obvious to the user wanting to enter data to Lost Cousins.

 

It may be possible to simply lift the RD codes and create a list of valid ones. Then when someone enters a code on the website check to see if it was valid and reject if not. Perhaps something like "That code doesn't appear valid please check for a missing hyphen."

Indeed you might be able to lookup the first few characters entered and suggest a possible code. eg: if someone enters 1681 you could check that 168 was St.Nicholas Aberdeen by telling the user what RD you thought it was and getting them to confirm as well as perhaps suggesting it should be 168-1?

 

Perhaps the best solution is to persuade findmypast to correct their faulty database? They could correct the descriptions of the references at the same time.

 

Yup. It may just be an entirely cosmetic display only issue, and they haven't bothered to adjust the descriptions and the data display when it's a Scottish record.

 

Do you know where the data in the spreadsheet originated?

 

That is the data published as the official record of RD's on the Scotland's People Website. I downloaded it from there yesterday.

 

Thanks - in that case one would hope that findmypast would be able to use the data (although I don't suppose that Scotlandspeople are too keen about Ancestry and findmypast producing their own transcriptions of the Scotland censuses).

 

Indeed FindMyPast is owned by BrightSolid is it not, and they are the company that do Scotland's People, so you'd think they'd be able to co-operate!!

 

BrightSolid handle the technical side of Scotlandspeople, but they don't own the site or have any control over how it is run (unfortunately, otherwise it might not be pay-per-view only). Findmypast had to produce their own transcriptions of the Scottish censuses (which can't have been cheap), and they haven't been any luckier at obtaining the census images than Ancestry.