[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Identifying places in databases

[Dave Obee]

Further to the dialogue on how to enter placenames, and how to correct them:

1. If you come across a record that says "Red Deer, NWT, Canada," is it
proper to correct it to "Red Deer, Alberta, Canada"? Of course not. At the
very least, you would have to make sure that the record wasn't referring to
Red Deer, Saskatchewan, or even one of the Red Deer Lakes. There's always
the danger of making well-intentioned but erroneous changes. (And it's far
easier for us to deal with a name such as Red Deer, because there are so
many sources for North American genealogy that are readily available. It's
much tougher when we're dealing with Eastern Europe, because few of us have
all the sources we need.)

2. In the Zhitomir archives in 2002, I discovered that the person I had
hired to do some work for me there a few years earlier had "corrected"
placenames as he extracted information. That meant every document had to be
rechecked, and of course, this being Zhitomir, they couldn't find all the
ones he had looked at. Discovering what had happened helped me to understand
why all of my efforts on that line had come up dry. I wasted time and money
chasing a bad lead because this guy had glanced at the documents and made
assumptions. And because he hadn't bothered to give me the original names as
well as his fictional ones, I had no clues to use to start fixing the mess.

If I see a placename of Solotroi and I know it's a Solodyri family, I'll
make that change. But there's a tremendous danger in being too hasty in
correcting what appears to be wrong. Not only do we need to know that the
original reference is, in fact, incorrect, but we also have to know beyond
any doubt that what we are proposing as a replacement is accurate.

Dave Obee