Family history research projects seem to present new challenges with each new generation. It is easy to get lost—and I hope posting a few tips as I go along will help others avoid common mistakes.

The Latin word “ditto” was once common in our American English language, as recently at 50 years ago. It means “to say the same” or simply “the same.” It appears often in historical documents and seems almost as often to be incorrectly transcribed. I have run across two examples in the past week on Ancestry.com. Both change the meaning of the record and create unnecessary confusion.

In the first example, deaths are listed in a column that uses “do” rather than repeating the full text of cause of death. The pic shows that some died of “Fits” and some, including David Ackley, died of “Poison.”[1] But only the first entry in each category shows the full word, the rest use “do” instead. The way people using quill pens wrote “do” can it make it hard to decipher—as the image suggests. In this case, “do” appears transcribed on Ancestry.com as “C”—which is completely wrong. (I am not sure the record is correct but, if not, it is a mistake made in 1850 and a different issue.)

This transcription can be misleading in another way. The census was done in JUNE 1850 for the previous 12 months. The record shows that David died in July, but it was July 1849 because July 1850 had not yet happened. This is clear in the original document, but not in the Ancestry summary.

In the second example, my 2^nd great grandfather Arthur (oldest brother of David) appears in a city directory for the county of Oswego in 1869. He owned 34 acres of land near New Centreville (which originally used the British spelling). His address was not “34 Do.”

Arthur’s youngest brother Andrew’s address was not “10 Sandbank” (which should be Sand Bank, two words, renamed Altmar in 1895). He owned 10 acres near Sand Bank.

Anyone looking for a street named “Do” or “Sandbank” will be busy for a long time.

The moral of the story: when using online genealogy sources, it is important be mindful that many of these transcriptions are done using artificial intelligence—at least I hope humans are not directly responsible. Reading the original is crucial—the original of the directory clearly explains that the numbers indicate acres owned. The confusion created by “do” shows that knowing about language used in old documents also can be important.

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[1] More on that in a blog post to appear this week.