Same search but different results from SP and Ancestry

Hugo · Post by **Hugo** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 11:19 am

I have just run the same search of the 1841 Census (Scotland) on SP and Ancestry and got different answers.

The search was Dun??h*

SP gave 9 hits and Ancestry gave 5! The Ancestry surnames are included in SP but there is disagreement on one first name - SP gives a Susan and a Jean while Ancestry gives two Susan's.

The family is not related so my interest in the anomaly is mainly curiosity.

Anyone else found a similar mismatch between SP and Ancestry?

Hugo

Post by **AndrewP** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 1:47 pm

Hi Hugo,

In my experience, such discrepancies are usually down to Ancestry's mis-transcription of the records.

All the best,

AndrewP

Hugo · Post by **Hugo** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:46 pm

Greetings AndrewP,

I do not have anything like your wealth of genealogical experience and I am thankful for people such as yourself who are willing to help us newbies.

I was aware that Ancestry was reputed to have transcription errors, I had not realised they were as blatant as this.

It makes me wonder if there is any benefit from using Ancestry.

Post by **AndrewP** » Wed Nov 05, 2008 7:55 pm

Hugo wrote:It makes me wonder if there is any benefit from using Ancestry.

Yes, there are benefits from using Ancestry. A search on first names (child and one or both parents; or husband and wife) in a household, without any surname can sometimes get you around a mistranscribed surname, and down to the right family group. Then if you wish, go and spend the money and download the original from ScotlandsPeople to see what was written originally. Other search combinations that are not possible on SP may be town or parish, surname (and/or first name) and occupation.

All the best,

AndrewP

karenmcc · Post by **karenmcc** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 2:04 am

Hi Hugo,

I don't have a subscription, but my local library does. As Andrew says, you can do searches that can't be done on SP, which is very handy if your family name has some really weird varient that wouldn't even be picked up by wild cards on the original. You can even search on just occupation if you want. So I do find it quite useful.

Karen

morgano · Post by **morgano** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 4:01 am

Also, Ancestry sometimes gets it right, when SP gets it wrong. I was just looking for a Marjory Ann McLaren (born and married in Perthshire) in the 1891 census. Searching SP, county by county, it would have taken me a while to get around to searching Argyll, but a search of all of Scotland could have been expensive. Ancestry turned up May Ann McLaren in no time and it turned out that SP had her down as Mary.

What I was actually looking for was information about the languages spoken by Marjory and her family, since 1891 was the year in which that question was added to the census form. For some reason, the Ancestry transcription ignores this column of the form. (For the record, Marjory and her husband were bilingual, but the language column is blank for their children, presumably implying that they spoke only English, representing a precipitate decline in the use of Gaelic in a single generation.)

In all, I needed both Ancestry and SP: Ancestry to simplify my search, but SP, too, to deliver the information I wanted in the first place.

Morgano

Hugo · Post by **Hugo** » Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:07 am

OK. I am convinced.

Use Ancestry but double check the results; I must remember this as something to do, not just to pay lip service to.

I use SP for my Scottish ancestors and have started using Ancestry mainly for my Liverpool ones.

Hugo

Post by **emanday** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 2:30 am

Hi Hugo,

I use Ancestry sometimes for my Scottish lot and my in-law's English lot and have found that taking advantage of the "check box" to allow for spelling variations usually gets better results, providing you can overlook some of the really weirder offerings they come up with as variations on a name