Ancestry BMD images alphabet crossover

I've noticed a problem with the Ancestry images
where letters cross over on one page Ancestry starts the letter on the next
page - this may have made people think some pages where missing when in fact
they are there, just at the end of the previous letter.

Hugh Watkins...

when I get a wrong images
I start browsing

just like using fiche but slower

Hugh W

steven.berry...

There are literally 1000s (probably 10s of 1000s) of errors in the
indexing of the
Ancestry BMD images. Sometimes, as somebody else pointed out recently,
there
are huge swathes that are unreachable. I reckon the error rate
aproaches something
like 1 in 4.

indexing is
better and the images load much faster over my steam-powered modem,
being between
a quarter and half the size of the Ancestry images.

Will J...

I think you are slightly exageratting the problem- AFAIK there are only two
whole quarters missing in 1925 and 1929 for the images. Apart from the fact
that where letters overlap the letter starts on a new page I haven't seen
any other errors.

steven.berry...

I just picked a name and year at random and low and behold came up with
a problem.Try Herbert Thompson, Births, any quarter, 1934. Oh what? No
December quarter. Then tried Herbert Thompkins, same year and quarter,
and wow - we have the first half of the Thompsons in the december
quarter suddenly appearing. Needless to say, there is a Herbert
Thompson in the 2nd column on the following page.

Will J...

I have to say I've never actually used that search facility - I just browse.
I'm not sure why the Herbert Thompson doesn't come up (the page does show up
if you just search for Thompson) but this seems to be more a problem with
the indexing not the images.

Astral Voyager...

The problem is, as I stated recently here, down to whoever indexed the pages
for Ancestry. The page you refer to containing Herbert Thompson has a
manuscript late addition at the bottom of the page for a Grace Thompson.
Whoever indexed the page took that as the last entry on the page so the
page, according to them runs from Thompson, Derek F. to Thompson, Grace - so
Herbert Thompson will not be found. Obviously the indexing was done by
people that had no real understanding of what they were doing.

I don't know if Ancestry is working on fixing this but it appears less
prevalent than it used to be. Best bet if you get a missing quarter when
looking for a name is to reduce the surname search string (say, in this
case, to 'Thom') and than page forward to see if the name appears in the
quarter.

steven.berry...

Another BIG hole I've just come across is Marriages, December quarter
1969:
The whole of T through to Z is missing and the last page of S, ending
with
SZYRMA, Elizabeth seems ok (ie. no manual annotations af the bottom of
the page).