[ANSTHRLD] 16th century IGI parish transcriptions

[kobrien at texas.net]

Quoting Yin Mei Li <yinmeili at ida.net>:

> > Will the SCA accept the English parish register transcripts from pre
> > 1650 era that the LDS has published in the IGI?
> 
> Not from the IGI itself, because of the uneveness in scholarship of those 
> allowed to enter information (virtually anybody).  However, for what Yin 


Exactly.  "uneveness" is a good description.  I wrote the Cibella precedent 
that was cited earlier in this thread and I was trying to be clear in the 
precedent while being concise because it was going in an LoAR.

Here's an illustration of the IGI problem:


I've been the family genealogist since I was 12.  When I lived outside of 
Washington, D.C., a number of years ago, I took advantage of many of the 
resources available in the area - including the library at the LDS tabernacle 
in Maryland.  [That one and one in Los Angeles are the largest LDS libraries 
outside of Salt Lake City.]

Among the genealogy I research is my Brunette family which were one of the 
early families in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  The records indicate (but I haven't 
locked down absolute solid proof yet) that they were the Brunette family that 
was among the 6 founding families in Green Bay in 1746 and that they came 
from Montreal.  So, I'm constantly on the lookout for records for colonial 
French Canada and it's rural areas (which included Green Bay when it was 
founded).

Several libraries in the D.C. area had records that were helpful to me in 
this search, including the IGI, both the online version and it's predecessor -
 the "card file".

The IGI started out as a card file many, many years ago.  It was very similar 
to the old library index card files that many of us dealt with in grade 
school and sometimes still deal with in some libraries today.

This card file got computerized at some point.

The original card file was archived on microfiche but the data from it still 
exists in the IGI today.  Copies of the 'fiche are available in Salt Lake 
City, Los Angeles, and D.C.

As part of my research, I printed out copies of all Brunette records in 
the 'fiche so I could look through them later.

When I sat down and went over them, what I discovered is that there were many 
cases of the same person being entered in the IGI cardfile from the same 
records, often from Tanguay's book on the genealogies of the families of 
Quebec (this book was printed in French in the early 1800s).  Tanguay's book 
has long since been microfilmed and I had already printed out all the 
Brunette pages (all spellings).

What I found when I compared the microfiche printouts to the Tanguay 
printouts were that nearly all of the entries in the IGI were standardized, 
modernized, normalized, translated to English, typoed, or just plain 
transcribed wrong.  A couple of the researchers had transcribed the info from 
Tanguay accurately, but that was rare.

So, the lesson here is to go to the original source if at all possible 
because you can't tell from a single IGI line how reliable the transcription 
is.

In the case of the 16th C parish registers, the registers are almost 
certainly online somewhere or are available in a printed book via inter-
library loan or they have been microfilmed by the LDS.  Using any of these 
sources would be better than the IGI itself since it gives the CoA an 
opportunity to evaluate the quality of the transcription (for example, even 
scholarly, very accurate transcriptions of parish registers often silently 
expand abbreviations).

I'm digging out my email and haven't read the original message in this 
thread.  Is there a particular name being discussed or that a submitter 
wants?  If so, it may be easy to re-doc it from a different source.

Mari