Friday, November 01, 2013

Searchable Census of 1921, continued


Charles Levi, by email, referring to Wednesday's post about the 1921 census:
You are being far too polite to the index-monkeys at Ancestry.
 I have a nice simple four-letter last name. Levi. It's an old name, been around for ages.
 The 1921 census takers put it down as Levy for my great-grandfather Paul Levi, living on Beverley Street with his 10 (!) kids.
 The Ancestry indexers, unfamiliar with early 20th century penmanship, put down the last name as "Reay". That's right, two letters wrong and a pretty key two letters if you are trying to search.  I am a very good searcher so I found them.
 O.K. I looked at the image and "Reay" is one interpretation of it, if you are in a hurry, and know nothing about Jewish history and surnames.
 There seems to be no way to put through a correction to this using Ancestry Library edition.
 And my other great-grandfather's occupation is "paddler" (!) Who paddles on Beverley Street? It's clearly "peddler". No-one seems to stop to think about this while indexing.
 There are dozens of these errors on every page.  
(Image from Ancestry.ca)
 
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