The "Suggest Alternatives" feature allows you to suggest corrections for potential mistakes in the spelling of a name you find in the MyHeritage historical records search engine, directly from the records. If you find a record in the search engine and realize that there is a mistake with the name of the person, either because you understand the handwriting better, or because you have personal knowledge about that person, then you can suggest the correct form of the last name, first name, or both, for any person in almost any record.
Please note, this feature only appears on the record page accessed via the search engine and not from the Record Match page.
Back in the old days, all documents were handwritten, and the documents that survived are often written in handwriting that is very difficult to read by today’s standards. Companies like MyHeritage have been transcribing the records and creating a searchable index for them. This process involves deciphering very difficult handwriting, which often leads to mistakes. Sometimes, the mistakes aren’t even ours, but they are the fault of the clerks who wrote the documents. Some vital records include incorrect information because for various reasons, people intentionally lied about certain facts such as their age.
Here is an example of handwriting that is challenging deciphering, in an old church record from Canada:
At MyHeritage, we commission and supervise the work of offshore teams that manually transcribe hundreds of millions of records for us each year. The staff doing the transcription oftentimes cannot be culturally fluent in every culture around the world and thus, mistakes happen. The problem is that, when some records have 'mistranscribed' names, and we are looking for people in the MyHeritage search engine with the right name, we may not find the record.
There are mistakes in names that the MyHeritage search engine can easily overcome, but there are types of mistakes that can be so unpredictable that a search engine cannot overcome them. That is why we decided to invite our users to contribute to fixing errors, sharing suggestions, and benefit the entire genealogical community.
Your suggestions will be automatically indexed once a week into the MyHeritage search engine. Other users will be able to find that record when they search using the correct name, whereas previously, they had to actually guess what the wrong name was if they wanted to find that record.
Please note that suggested alternative names will not replace the current name in the transcription. They will be indexed as synonyms and even if you submit an incorrect suggestion, another user can submit a correct one. People can contribute multiple name suggestions to a single record.
You can suggest alternative names in collections like census, birth, marriage and death records, passenger lists, military records, and more. All structured records that have name fields can receive an alternative suggestion by users.
Suggesting alternatives is a free feature that anyone can use on records they have access to. Please note that some records in the search engine are only available to subscribers with a Data or a Complete subscription.
To learn more, please read: How can I fix a mistake from a historical record in the MyHeritage search engine?