Why so many duplicate ordinances performed?

[russellhltn]

This got me to thinking, do patrons just submit names without any confirming info.

I've heard FHC workers tell stories about patrons that download GEDCOMS from the Internet and process them. And then they cop an attitude when the workers try to get them to check for duplicates. In some cases they download them from PRF which shows the work already done and they try to do it again.

Technology can help, but it's the servant, not the master. The first line of action is in teaching the members correct principles. Unfortunately, I suspect the message that members hear is do work for your ancestors (accompanied by all the great stories about wonderful experiences, visiting angels, etc, that goes with it), and not make sure the work is done. There's an important distinction between the two.

[RonaldF-p40]

In reading these comments it got me to thinking about submitting names. My great great great grandfather had his work done for him about 45 years ago. Last month we discovered the name they did was not our great great great grandfather. His name was misspelled on his immigration records but the LDS Immigration ship log had his correct name (hence this is why we hit a road block with him for the past 7 years, we had the wrong name). This got me to thinking, do patrons just submit names without any confirming info. This is serious work and we can't be careless. This is the house of the Lord and we need to work hard. I agree technology should be able to help us, but the Lord has asked us to do his work and do it right, I would consider verifying your info before you submit to be one of these.

Also consider “Americanization” of names. I always new my great grandfather as John, but passenger listings found since I did his work indicate his name in the “old” country was Johann. The spelling of his last name was different also. It also was “Americanized”. If a German relative found the same passenger list and submitted the work under the original German version, nothing in the system would catch it right now. The work would be duplicated. Who would be responsible for the duplication?

"Members should be diligent in assuring the accuracy of all information submitted [for ordinance work]." Request of the First Presidency. (Ensign, Sept. 1995, 80)

“Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation.” (Doctrine and Covenants | Section 128:24)

[rmrichesjr]

Also consider “Americanization” of names. I always new my great grandfather as John, but passenger listings found since I did his work indicate his name in the “old” country was Johann. The spelling of his last name was different also. It also was “Americanized”. If a German relative found the same passenger list and submitted the work under the original German version, nothing in the system would catch it right now. The work would be duplicated. Who would be responsible for the duplication?

...

My wife has a much wilder example of "Americanization." Her ancestor "Harman <Jan> Barkeloo" is the son of "Jan (Johan) Lubberdinck." The story goes that when the Lubberdinck family moved from Europe to America, the immigration worker couldn't spell the surname of Lubberdinck, so he asked them what city they lived near. They said the nearest city was Giestren. He couldn't spell that either, so he asked for a larger city, and they said Barkeloo or something similar. The immigration worker wrote that down and told them that was their new surname. Her more modern cousins spell the surname Barklow. It takes real research and source checking to correctly handle wild situations like that.

[russellhltn]

The story goes that when the Lubberdinck family moved from Europe to America, the immigration worker couldn't spell the surname of Lubberdinck, so he asked them what city they lived near.

Take a look at the second article on this page

[scion-p40]

Several thoughts on reasons for duplicate templework:
1. The extraction program is not compared to existing templework. (Does anyone know if there is a plan to change this?)
2. Some records are change after submission to create "standardization". These changes do not take history into account. For example, someone born in Lithuania prior to 1900 shows up as born in the USSR, which did not exist for decades later. The same is true for Germany and other places with new names and/or boundary changes.
3. Submitter records in various US states are also sometimes "corrected" on the IGI to similar town or county names in another state.
4. Spelling variations occur within the same document, or not. Figuring out that Runnells may also go by Runels isn't terribly challenging. However, the same name may also be Reynolds, Randles, Rindel, etc. It takes time for researchers to discover the more far-fetched variations, such as Gregory being spelled Craygor.
5. Researchers differ in what they give more weight based on their experience or inexperience.
6. Records availability changes over time. What might be pulled up today with a few keystrokes in 15 minutes may have been stored in an attic or basement and unavailable to the public until last year.
7. Living families are frequently not particularly close today. (huge, broad brush here! ) People do not tend to know more than one or two generations back and frequently do not know aunts and uncles, let alone great aunts and uncles, etc. This compounds the difficulty of cooperating with unknown potential relatives to research a common ancestor.
8. Some folks use different names at different times. The US standard today is first, middle, last. Some folks also have multiple middle names or use a christening name.
9. Some cultures did not have written records. Relying on verbal tradition creates variation.
10. Family traditions can cause errors. A friend of mine came from a large family. No one in her immediate family was born in the same month--until she bought her siblings' birth certificates! They were all clustered in just a few months. Presumably for financial reasons, the parents selected a birthday for each child that was thereafter celebrated and reported as their birthday for the rest of their lives. Another friend of mine ordered her birth certificate for the first time due to a genealogy class assignment. When she got it, she was shocked to find that nearly 70 years ago she had been adopted. On the other hand, official records can have errors, too.


There are many other reasons for duplication, too.

[russellhltn]

3. Submitter records in various US states are also sometimes "corrected" on the IGI to similar town or county names in another state.

Or another country/region all together. Failure to adhere to accepted standards of entering place names places a big role here. CO = Colorado or County? CA = California or Canada? Georgia = Georgia, USA or the country Georgia?

If the name is categorized into the wrong region of the IGI, it won't easily be found by any of the computer programs.

Then again, you've got someone who has immigrated from Germany to the US. Which region of the IGI is his work recorded? What if the person doing the research only knows half the story? (e.g. - has birth certificate so only searches Europe, or another only has the death certificate, so only searches North America.)

When searching, did the person check "World Miscellaneous" where many of the poorly formatted place names go?

And this is all ignoring the whole issue of how good the search engine is in matching the submitted person against what's found in the IGI.

[scion-p40]

Or another country/region all together. Failure to adhere to accepted standards of entering place names places a big role here. CO = Colorado or County? CA = California or Canada? Georgia = Georgia, USA or the country Georgia?

Abbreviations is another issue that I did not mention. The IGI moving an event from the state of Indiana to the county of Indiana, Pennsylvania makes it highly unlikely to be considered a match by a human being. Even when accepted standards are followed, the IGI "corrections" make it challenging for submitters to find their own work, let alone search for possible matches submitted by others.

[rmrichesjr]

In the early 2007 beta of the new FamilySearch, one of the issues I reported was connected to place names being mangled in this manner. Some of my ancestors had events during the latter 1800s listed as having happened in India. As far as I am aware, none of those ancestors went anywhere near that side of the planet during mortality. Some of the heuristics currently used to munge place names could use some work. At least NFS allows the option of keeping the place name as originally entered along with the munged version of the name.

On the bright side, with the NFS being the one-stop repository for all those records, it ought to be feasible to dispute and override (or perhaps correct outright) a lot of the old historical gunk. Over time, accuracy should improve--at least if people are reasonably careful.

Also, as NFS starts reducing submission for new duplicate ordinances, that should free up some of the patrons to hopefully catch up on the backlog. Shrinking the backlog should ease the pressure to do duplicate ordinances, which should reinforce the trend toward reduced duplication, which should help trim the backlog, etc. It would surprise me greatly if at some point in time the extraction program did not get tied in with NFS, too.

[MarianJohnson]

Pack1970 mentioned that the church did the checking for duplication prior to 1991. He did not mention that when names were submitted, they were ALL sent to Salt Lake and it took many months before the submitter heard bach that their names had been cleared for ordinances.

In 1991, TempleReady was introduced. Although the church knew that there were inherent weaknesses in the system, the hope was to get names cleared more efficiently. Here is the problem: At that time the IGI on CDs was updated once every four years, which meant that if you checked for duplicates, the data being checked against could be as much as 4 years old. You can see that a name could be easily submitted many times during that four years, and TempleReady would not catch it, because it wasn't on the CD yet. A second issue was that if a member was so anxious to have a name to take to the temple, and TempleReady identified a possible match, even if the data was identical, the member could click on the option "Not a Match" and do the temple work again. By thetime new CDs were released every four years, the data actually on the CD was already nearly a year old. I don't have the information at hand, but I believe that the last time CDs were released was in the year 2000 containing data up through 1999. Could someone with access to an FHC confirm or correct that statement?

[JamesAnderson]

There are a couple things here I could mention.

Place names:
USA: They have asked that we put in the 'USA' designation as the last field for a locality that is in the USA. That tells anyone outside the US that the locality is in the USA, and not in some other country, such as India (IN is the code for India as well as Indiana). Those who work with the IGI at Church HQ have seen this one as well--some patron put the abbreviation CA for Central America on some names from Costa Rica and someone at the temple at San Jose wondered where they went after the work was sent in and they needed to check for duplicates (they at one time would clear names at the temples in some areas). They wound up in California in the North America region. That group of names now appears in the right place online.

I see some areas missing the regional name that would clearly identify it due to lack of research into the history of the locality. It would often be like saying someone was born in West Virginia in 1810 (WV did not exist until 1863). Have seen this extensively in Western and Central European areas where the names of the larger areas changed frequently in the 1800s, it's more accurate to state what the locality was known as at the time the event happened rather than using the later name for the same region.

'Anglicizing names' (slightly different than 'Americanization')
Anglicizing is similar to Americanization, and is the more proper term for how a name gets changed from the original language to the new language. The German Roderick became Rodriguez/Rodrigues, etc., the German Rosslaer became the Italian Rossetti, etc., and I have even seen where census takers misspelled Rodriguez as Rodriquez because some Spanish speakers for any number of reasons did not know that Spanish speakers often soften the sound of a hard G and so it will sound like a Q.