In the 1940 census in Waldo County, Maine, a census taker used the abbreviation "Me" for place of birth, etc. I am finding that Ancestry has listed this as "Mexico." This has appeared on MANY pages of records. I have corrected this on those relatives of mine where I am sure of their place of birth.

I am hoping that I can alert the Ancestry staff to this problem so that they can review these records and make large scale corrections. I just don't know how to contact the right person.

For census indexers who indexed the 1850/1860 census, many of them indexed the state of Georgia as GA and it was listed as Georgia the country as in Russia. This is not a new thing because the indexers are not accumstomed to US states. It is sad however.

For Georgia, sometimes the Ga has been interpreted as Germany, too.

To contact staff, the contact us button at the bottom of this page will take you to phone numbers.

There are still a couple of email addresses
ancestrysupport@custhelp.com
support@ancestry.com

There's also a "report a problem" button on every census page, at the top right.

That too. But to be honest, if we were hired to index foreign names, how accurate could we be. I sure could not be.

How true. And unfortunately, this type of thing seems to always be a problem with Ancestry. In early Census years, for North Carolina there are pages where they've erroneously confused the indexing for the Counties of Wilson and Wilkes. They have listed quite a few pages that say "Wilson" under "Wilkes" County, and when you go to the actual images, they are rarely difficult to read the location, so I don't know what's up with that. I've reported the issues on the pages I've found the problems, but heaven only knows when, or if they will ever fix it.

Another census abbreviation misinterpretation:

In the 19th century, Indiana was often abbreviated as "Ia". I have run across numerous census records where the enumerator uses the "Ia" abbreviation for Indiana on the form, and the transcriber picks it up as "Iowa".

Just something to be on the lookout for. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time looking in the wrong state!

Agreed, pdinger44. I'm from Indiana so this is 1 of my biggest pet peeves with the census indexes here. I've wondered at times how many census pages from a given state an individual transcriber/indexer indexes.

After indexing a number of pages from the same state, I would think, at some point, common sense would kick in or a light bulb would go off with the idea that hmmm...it seems really strange that all of these people living in Indiana were born in Iowa. Of course, since the indexing is outsourced to China, it's entirely possible that thought wouldn't even enter their minds.

LOL, I was just assuming that the transcribers were young & were only familiar with the modern 2-letter state abbreviations. It never occurred to me that the indexing might outsourced to foreign countries. Sigh.....

That sure would explain my relatives being named retired or a census full of people had an occupation of Strathmore. As in Strathmore Alberta. Here I was blaming OCR software. LOL

Yeah, earlier this year there were several discussions about the outsourcing thing. They did get an index up fast but it's lacking in the accuracy category. Below is a link to 1 thread that discussed it.

http://boards.ancestry.com/topics.ancestry.ancsite/12103.1/m...