17 February 2013

At Least They Didn't Think It Was Goldenslime

It's always easy to criticize the transcriber when we know what the name is.

What does the name of this boarder in this 1910 census enumeration from Arkansas look like? At the time of this blog post, Ancestry.com had three renderings of this name. The first one was made by Ancestry.com and the others were apparently made by other Ancestry.com users. It is very easy to see how the transcriptions came to be in the way they were. 

This screen shot shows the three interpretations of this name. It's apparent that none of Bernhard's relatives have made an entry as the last name is Goldenstein. Bernard is one of my great-grandmother Habben's younger brothers and he was living in Arksnas on rice land purchased by his father.
I've made the annotation regarding the name. I'm not certain how long it takes additional interpretations to appear.

It is always beneficial to search for additional spellings. Bernard was locating by searching for individuals born in Nebraska, living in Arkansas whose last name started with "Gol."