Publicising Lost Cousins

All entries should be checked, not just those entered through FTA. In fact, I suspect that there will be fewer entries that need altering when FTA is used than when users enter the information manually!

 

Ah then perhaps a flag on all entries that shows whether the user has clicked to check them or not so that it's something that applies to all entries added.

I'm running a poll at present on the website to ask if people have heard of Lost Cousins and if they have joined or not. Only 27 replies so far so not representative but 16 Lost Cousins members 8 haven't heard of it before 2 members who have not entered anyone and one just joined as a result of reading about it in FTAnalyzer.

Oh and beta 7 available.

 

BTW with the data entered so far has there been any issues noted? I noticed a problem with missing Schedules in 1911 census and that affected my test user and Tim (who is now working through them to fix the Missing Schedule numbers). Beta 2 had a value of Missing for Schedule number and I'd not checked to prevent that being used and unfortunately the website accepted it. However Tim noticed and we caught and squashed that bug. Hence the reason for limited beta testing before live.

 

How does your data show in the census report does it record it as a good census entry?

When you say it fails is it saying in the text box it fails (good) or is it uploading the wrong data to Lost Cousins (bad).

I strongly suspect that I will need to add extra census recognition for non UK census entries.

 

Ok that’s good that they didn’t upload. The duplicates do you mean they had previously been manually entered by you? The difference being the age? I’m assuming that you hadn’t tagged those people with a custom fact as having a Lost Cousins entry? Thus as far as the program was concerned they hadn’t been entered?

My understanding is that the Lost Cousins website doesn’t allow you to enter two people with identical names and census references so I’m assuming the name is slightly different or the age is different?

It may be an idea for me to add a checker to read the my ancestors page and try to work out if the person is already there. Some form of checklist against your existing entries.

 

Could you give me some example full census references that have been recognised but aren’t uploading. I’m thinking it’s the ones with T627 and m-t0627 not sure about Canadian ones though.

I suspect it’s recognising it as a valid census pattern but submitting the t627 bit which Peter mentions should be stripped. So I’ll need to check how it’s recognised and tweak the recognition routine. So examples will help.

 

Ok, interesting I'd only ever seen the 1940 as Roll; Page; ED before. I'll add a recognition to that format. I noted I'd left the T627_'s on so that will be the reason they failed.

I don't understand the Canadian Reference though it needs a district, sub-district, page and family and that doesn't appear to have those 4 bits of info.

 

Could you send me the GEDCOM for just the individual with that Canadian reference so I can see what the raw data looks like please.

 

Thanks the full reference was:

Year: 1881; Census Place: Aldborough, Elgin West, Ontario; Roll: C_13266; Page: 67; Family No: 301

Beta 9 out that should cater for that properly now.

I've still to add a bunch of other checks as per info Peter kindly sent me.

 

The 1940 ones are interesting It should already trim the M-T0627 entry however I've not added all of Peter's rules yet to trim leading zeros. Again seeing the original GEDCOM for those 3 would help test what's happening.

 

Beta 10 now out added extra checks for formats of census references that are allowed by Lost Cousins (also strips out things like the M-T0627 stuff) so more references should be allowed.

Latest state of poll is:
4 - I'm a member and have entered everyone at Lost Cousins I've found (I suspect they haven't but...)
46 - I'm a member and I've entered some people but could do more
10 - I'm a member but only for the newsletter
35 - I'm not a member and haven't heard of Lost Cousins before
8 - I'm not a member but have heard of Lost Cousins

So 103 entries which is likely reasonably representative of the 750 people who have liked the page and the 1700+ people who have used FTAnalyzer in the last month. Of the testers mean number of new entries added is around 150 - although one person added over 1000 new entries.

If just 10% of the current FTAnalyzer users use this new feature that will add an approximate 25,500 entries. If just 10% of the Lost Cousins Membership use the program as a result of a newsletter article then we are looking at a likely 1.3 million new entries added. That of course assumes just the people that have already entered lots of people add the extras. If those people how haven't bothered entering Lost Cousins have closer to the 1000 mark as one person did then it could be several million new entries.

All of course of which is why I'm doing LOTS of betas before making this live.