Why are FamilySearch census ages so often mistranscribed?

Question

I often find that the ages transcribed in the census records at FamilySearch are one year more than what is plainly written on the census images. It's not every record, but many times I have to correct more than half of the members of a family. If I compare to Ancestry they generally are transcribed accurately.

Is there some reason why ages are so often wrong at FamilySearch?

Answer 1

I don't know why the numbers are misinterpreted when indexed. Those are pretty easy to read. I understand the difficulty of interpreting some cursive handwriting on the names.  But, you would think they numbers should be easy.

Only thing I can think of is the errors are typos. Typed the wrong number when indexing and did not catch the mistake. But even that does not explain all of the errors.

Answer 2

I wonder if it has something to do with the way the computer reads the digits or the letters. I have a certificate that says "Creighton" and is interpreted as "Geighton" on FamilySearch. It was not written in cursive.

Comments

It's not a computer that reads the image (which is done by an OCR program, meaning Optical Character Recognition).  It's a veritable army of real live people who volunteer to transcribe records for familysearch.

---

FamilySearch now uses a combination of OCR and indexing volunteers. FamilySearch Blog: How Machine-Learning and OCR Are Changing Family History