Transcription error

No question, just a comment. I was just doing some research on my uncle's
family. I'm planning to surprise him with a family tree. Anyway, I have
been trying to track down this one particular person and was having no luck
in the 1870 census. Tonight I found him with his family under probably the
WORST trasncription error I have ever seen.

His name is William LAPSLEY, wife Mary, children: Robert, Ella and George.
I only happened upon them by searching for Ella's born in OH in her age
range living in KS.

The name I found them under you ask?

QAPSZ !!

How the heck did that happen? Did the person typing that not stop for a
second and wonder if there was possibly a mistake with that spelling?

Pam...

Alida,

I read an article about all the mistakes in the Ancestry database for census
records (including some Ind. abbreviations for Indiana being transcribed as
India!) and it was mentioned that a lot of the transcription work was
outsourced to other countries and people doing the transcribing may not even
have spoken good English. So to them, our surnames probably looked
unfamiliar so they most likely didn't question QAPSZ. I'd say that was a
pretty bad one, though. :) Probably not all the transcriptions were done
that way as there was a lot of indexing done with the earlier census records
prior to putting it all on computers, but the later ones like 1870 were more
likely to be outsourced in the effort to get them all indexed as quickly as
possible (and as inexpensively as possible or we might be paying a whole lot
more than Ancestry charges).

Oh, isn't genealogy fun? I must say, its very rewarding when you finally
find someone that's been elusive. At least ancestry.com allows you to
submit corrections and the next person searching for them will have a much
easier time of it than I.

Happy Hunting!