Author: Shelly

I got these Findagrave edit suggestions today. The death location did need to be changed, so I approved it, but the other three? Why? Why would you remove a bio? Why would you make the birth location less specific? And the birth date is just plain wrong.

The information in the suggested edits came from the death certificate, which Shirley has helpfully added an image of to the Findagrave memorial. She has some salty words for people who don’t like that, in her Findagrave profile.

You can see the parents’ first names are not included, and the birth date is incorrect. The birth location is also not specific. Just Ireland.

Mary Agnes was the daughter of Patrick Basquil and Bridget Hynes (also spelled Hines and Hinds). She was born 20 Dec 1882 in Lackaun, a townland in Aughagower Civil Parish, County Mayo.

Findagrave does not play well with Irish place names, so the most specific you can get for this location is Aughagower, County Mayo, Ireland. That’s it. But I added the full birth location, the baptismal information, and the parents’ names in the bio. Which Shirley wanted me to remove.

The baptismal register image is dark and difficult to read, but it backs up the birth information. She was born in Lukane (or Likane? a variant spelling for Lackaun) and baptized 29 Dec 1882 in Aughagower Catholic Parish. The parents were listed as Patt Baskwell (or possibly Baskuell, which would be a new one for my collection) and Bridget Hynes. I’m pretty confident of my paper trail, and I’m pretty confident I have my facts straight and correct.

WHY? I really don’t understand. The edits she requested amount to vandalism, and they make absolutely no logical sense to me. I can understand using the information in the death certificate if you don’t have better, more reliable information available. That’s how it goes sometimes. But we have a very nice paper trail for Mary Agnes. We don’t need to rely on incomplete or incorrect information from a death record.

This is infuriating. When searching Ancestry for Indiana death certificates, exact does not mean exact. This doesn’t seem to be an issue with most other databases (though I’ve noticed it happening in Ancestry’s SSDI index, too). So it looks like you’ve gotten 31 hits for your search, only no, it’s really just 13. This isn’t a huge deal when you only get a short list of returns, but if you’re dealing with a common name, the list can be overwhelming. Even more so when you find the list is actually 2-3 times as long as it needs to be.

If I wanted the date to be a range, I’d have set it up that way in my search criteria.