Are we talking Alaska or Arkansas? (Or Oklahoma, or...)

Question

I'm working through the "Let other know what locations you are working on" page, trying to get it back up to five unconnected branches per jurisdiction after a whole bunch of the listed branches have been connected. (And a huge thank you to all the people who have put in so much work connecting those branches! You are helping to make WikiTree better and stronger, and you're helping to motivate people who might have been tempted to give up on WikiTree because they were having so much trouble getting connected to the main tree. Having to replenish lists of unconnected people is a wonderful "problem" to have!)

So far, I've made it down to Alaska, and then I ran into a problem. For one thing, Alaska hasn't been part of the United States of America for very long (at least, not compared to most states), and it's not exactly crowded, so there aren't a whole lot of profiles for people who were born in Alaska.

But more importantly, there are a bunch of profiles where the place of birth (or death) is marked as simply "AK", and in an awful lot of those cases, I suspect that the person was actually born (or died) somewhere other than Alaska. I'm not sure, but many of the profiles I've looked into appear to be for people from Arkansas, Oklahoma, or some other place, and the person creating the profile put in "AK" instead of "AR" or "OK" or whatever other two-letter code would apply. (And, yes, I know, they really should have spelled out the name of the state in full, but using the wrong state code made it even worse.)

So if you've been looking for profiles from Arkansas, Oklahoma, or possibly other places, and not finding them, that might be why. You can find open profiles with "AK" in them using this WikiTree+ search.

Comments

And unless United States is stated it could be anywhere in the world!

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Yes, that's why the Location Field Style Guide says "Use the full place name for counties, states, provinces, départements, etc."

The Netherlands project gets all suggestions  for Newfoundland and Labrador with place names ending NL for free...

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Dus de mensen in het Dutch Roots Project zijn allemaal experts op het gebied van Newfoundland en Labrador, toch?

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Thanks for the post.

As someone working in WAshington State United States I expected to have confusion with Washington DC.  But now find I must also  search Western Australia when stuck.

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Ja Greg, en de mensen in het Canada Project zijn natuurlijk allemaal experts op het gebied van Nederland, toch?

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Natuurlijk!

Answer 1

good point! thanks Greg. I think people get confused with the original abbreviation for Arkansas is Ark, and the 2 digit postal code is AR.

Comments

Canada used to use longer abbreviations, too. Being from British Columbia, the transition from "B.C." to "BC" shouldn't have been that hard, but it took me a long time to get used to dropping the periods. I imagine that it was harder for people from Alberta to go from "Alta" to "AB", but who I really feel sorry for is people from New Brunswick, because apparently, a lot of people confuse the "NB" for New Brunswick with the "NE" for Nebraska.

Answer 2

The one Alaska profile I picked to work on was actually Alabama.  Even the funeral home made the mistake with the AL as Alaska, but there were enough sources to prove it was Alabama.  I bet there are others like this.

Comments

Huh. I would not have guessed that.

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The first clue was that her birth town was Opelika, which I knew was in Alabama not Alaska, and the sources went from there.  I think the funeral home in Idaho just assumed the AL was Alaska not Alabama, which is what ended up in her obit.  I don't think her profile surname of Lincoln is correct, for her mother doesn't marry a Lincoln until the profile person is twelve. I can't figure out which of the first two husbands is her father, but I do have her linked to the big tree through the second husband of Dolberry.

The next profile I worked on was a member of the Haida tribe, and his birthplace of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska was correct.  It may be difficult to connect him to the big tree.