While doing his own family-history research, a client of ours logged onto Ancestry.com and found the 1900 U.S. census record for his great-grandfather. He contacted me, puzzled over how the census listed his forebear’s occupation. “It says he was a ‘capitalist bender,’ whatever that is!” he told me.
I was puzzled, too, and so I looked on Ancestry to see what was going on. The client was right. When you click on “View Record” in the search results list, the first screen you come to, which is a transcription of the census record, lists the occupation as “Capitalist Bender,” as shown below:
Transcription of census record
But when you open the image of the original census form itself and read the actual handwriting, though it is messy, it lists the occupation as “Carpenter & Builder.” That makes a lot more sense! (I confirmed it by matching the census taker’s writing of “carpenter” with other letters and words on the page. I also checked the later 1910 census, where the client’s great-grandfather was again listed as a “builder.”)
Original census record
Original census record
Mystery solved: “Capitalist bender” was a transcription error.
“Does that mean Ancestry isn’t an accurate source?” the client asked me.
My answer to that question has two parts. First, it is important to understand that Ancestry is not a source, it is a repository. Just as a library holds books, Ancestry holds records, and it is the records that are the sources.
Second, there are two types of sources on Ancestry: original and derivative. The original sources are images of actual paper records created at the time events took place, like birth certificates, marriage registers, and passenger lists. These are the real thing! The derivative sources are “derived” or created from the original sources by transcribing them in their entirety, or by extracting or abstracting portions of information from them.
“The lesson to be learned is to slow down when using genealogy websites.”
As we clearly saw from the example above, derivative records are prone to error. Since that’s the case, why do they show up first on Ancestry when you select an item from a search results list? This happens because it is the derivative record that allows you to find the item in the first place. Search engines do not search original records themselves because they are images. Instead, information is transcribed from the images—by people or AI—and entered into a database for the search engines to access, errors and all.
The lesson to be learned is to slow down when using genealogy websites. It is tempting to quickly scoop up an answer and move onto the next question. But we need to take the additional step of carefully examining original records in order to get an accurate representation of what the records hold.
Who knows what the person who erroneously transcribed the term “capitalist bender” was thinking when they entered that term on Ancestry? (Or was it an unthinking machine that did it?) But thanks to the extra, necessary step of researching the original census record, our client now knows that his great-grandfather worked as a carpenter and builder, giving him new information for the construction of his family tree.
Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.
