Ancestry search

Ancestry announced new features to the search at Who Do You Think You Are Live 2014 that will be added in next few weeks. Basically some sliders that will help you quickly narrow those 30,000 result searches into much smaller results. This should help a lot in narrowing down searches.

Also they are adding a feature where if you have an ancestry tree (private or public) you can turn on "smart filtering" this will filter out results you have already found. So searching for census records for example it will filter out years you have already entered against that person.

 

This seemed to work quite well to start with, but now I'm getting results from census years that I've already found etc.

 

Are you sure I don't think that feature is properly live yet. It may be it was during WDYTYA Live.

 

If there are more than a couple of hundred results when I carry out a search then I adjust the search parameters.

However it's important to remember that you get very different results depending whether you do or don't tick the Exact matches only box. I almost always do, primarily because Ancestry is absolutely terrible at prioritising the results. I'd rather use wildcards to introduce an element of flexibility (although not all fields permit wildcards).

 

I've been using it for a bit now, but maybe they're having teething issues.

I think this is how its meant to work, if you have an entry for 1891, it lists it at the top and then doesn't show any further 1891 census matches in the bottom bit.

 

It sounds to me as if you're searching multiple census years simultaneously - maybe even multiple types of record. That's something I rarely do because different datasets require different search techniques. For example, there's little or no birthplace information in 1841, and middle names are rarely shown on the earlier censuses even where they exist (indeed, I believe the enumerators were told not to collect them). I'm not sure that Ancestry handles these differences very intelligently.

Admittedly it's easier to search censuses individually at findmypast because when you move from one census to the next the search form is automatically populated (which is usually, though not always, a big time saver). Mind you, who knows what will and won't be possible when they introduce their new search?

 

Yes its a multiple record search. I use this first, so that everything that is easy for Ancestry to find gets listed.
As you say, once all the easy ones have gone, I use the single record approach. Even so, I find their searches a bit hit and miss.

 

You can always double click on a person in FTAnalyzer and have it automatically search Ancestry or Findmypast for you

 

That is very true, but I have to add them to my tree before they get into FTA. And when I add them, I try and add all the sources for everything I can find.

 

I usually do specific census searches, however I specifically AVOID exact matches!!! I avoid them because the transcriptions at Ancestry are typically very poor and so exact matches rarely find the person I'm looking for. If it's a person from my one name study I typically HAVE to use wild cards as there are so many variations it rarely finds anything if I use exact matches.

Then again being a computer scientist and understanding how the search is likely to be working behind the scenes means I can achieve quite complicated search results quite quickly. It's just a case of learning how the search engine works which is why people get all annoyed when a company changes their search engine as they have to relearn the quirks of getting the best results.

BTW I'll be updating FTAnalyzer when the new findmypast and ancestry searching are launched in case they have changed it so much my old search stops working. I'll also be adding to FTAnalyzer a WWI search to the Lives Of The First World War site from the War Dead tab following my discussions with their technical lead at WDYTYA Live.

 

Me too - but I use wildcards rather than rely on Ancestry's rather flaky system for prioritising results.

How's the weather where you are?

 

18 degrees and sunny today had a good tour around the rock.