28 August 2014

Aunt Margaret Married in the State of Providence

I make discoveries on Mocavo.com, but like any online database provider they have the occasional irregularities.

This first entry is for my great-aunt Margaret and her husband Robert. They married in Cache County, Utah, in 1947.

The database entry is a little bit off--probably due to irregularity when merging the original database into databases at Mocavo.com. The state and year are clearly off.

In the process of writing this blog post, I searched for Aunt Margaret again and discovered there were two entries for their marriage in the Mocavo.com database called "BYU Idaho Western States Marriage Index, 1809-2013."


The first reference shown is the one for which the detailed entry is shown above. The second entry in the search results contains the information in the correct fields.  Why there are two entries for this same marriage I'm not certain.

This data was incorporated into Mocavo.com's database from the original database which is housed on the BYU website. There are not two entries for the Habben-Hutchison marriage in that database (I know because I searched).

Sometimes it pays to put names in the wrong boxes when searching. Most databases do not have issues of this type, but occasionally when databases are automatically merged into larger databases errors do happen.

Mocavo.com finds things that are already online (in addition to some databases that other sites do not have)--the value they are offering for subscribers with these already online materials is that the results are grouped together and their search engine may locate things that you've not stumbled online while doing other searches.

The incorrect marriage entry indicates my aunt was married in the state of Providence--something ironic in that.