Publicising Lost Cousins

WARNING: Findmypast searches aren't working at the moment - it's a problem on their site, but will mean that the grey arrows don't work for some censuses.

 

OK I think I know what the issue is. In Options under Census check if the option to skip Census Reference checking is enabled or disabled. I strongly suspect it is skipping census reference checking.

I've edited the code to warn about this rather than report zero loaded.

 

Do you need to use an ID number as reference? Won't the census ref, names and age (or year of birth) be enough to make a unique record?

 

No not really the problem with names & dates of birth is that they can change for the same person. eg: you will have loads of records where at one time the date of birth was imprecise eg: ABT 1875 and subsequently has become more precise or exact eg: 7 AUG 1875. That means that person's record would have changed.

So dates of birth are bad for indexing purposes and names are not unique enough.

 

Beta 16 now available. Barring any show stopping bugs I'm going to release this as v7.3.0 so consider it v7.3.0-ReleaseCandidate-1

 

Peter can you advise how a 1881 Canadian census with a pattern of "C_13266; Page 67; Family 301" becomes an enterable Census ref. I'm assuming at present that this is an incomplete census reference?

 

It is indeed incomplete. Here is an example of an entry from my tree:

Source Canada 1881
District number 134
Sub-district F
Division
Page 188
Household number 888
Surname Butwell
Forename Henry

This is the FamilySearch page: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MVF3-5Y7

Note that FamilySearch no longer include the sub-district in their transcription (they did originally) - it has to taken from the image. So it's a similar situation to E&W 1911.

 

email to ftanalyzer@gmail.com ideally with the sample GEDCOM so I can test with the same data set.

 

Release Candidate 2 available fixes issue with some Counts of missing Lost Cousins facts.

 

Looking good Alexander, a truly great achievement. Peter, you must be so happy when this goes live, people won't be able to complain about how long it takes to enter their relatives now.

 

They'll still need to have the right census information in their trees, won't they? Or can FTA carry out a census search and pull in the information from FMP or Ancestry?

 

FTAnalyzer can carry out a census search for people who are missing but it never updates someone's tree so the user is always in control of THEIR tree. This is my guiding principal. The program never attempts to write data back to their family tree software. It will find data and suggest research matches but it is up to the user to determine if the suggestion is valid.

My gut feeling is that automated searches are great as it saves so much typing but at the end of the day a human has to make the decision on how to record the data otherwise it's nothing more than clicking random hints, and I loathe that. From a programming perspective it's easier too as there are so many different and varied formats of program out there to cater for them would be a nightmare and the risk of accidentally corrupting someone's data would be too high.

So whilst FTAnalyzer can find census records it is the user who will enter the data in their tree and therefore it's up to the user to accurately record the census reference. So naturally there is a scope for user error in the process.

Peter is right though when he said earlier that it's still up to the user to verify each entry again there is only so much an automated system can do. That said Peter's system already highlights some issues that need fixing and shows the user with a red mark they need to investigate.

What I'm not sure of is how extensive that checking is and whether that could be beefed up without adding too much extra load to the server?

I do however now have a situation when a user has logged in and uploaded their data that their ancestors page is loaded into FTAnalyzer (to prevent sending data that's already on the website). So it might be possible to have a routine that ran a check against that data via the link that's on the page already to the FMP site and check the index info on the FMP site against the reference info on LostCousins site (and in FTAnalyzer) for discrepancies.

 

Alexander, the red exclamation marks indicate close matches with other entries in the database where the only difference is the name. But most of the time there won't be another entry in the database. Other than the reference checks (which you already have) the grey arrows are the primary means of checking the data at the LostCousins end.

One thought - although manually adding additional household members after the first is a pretty trivial task, I know there are quite a few members who, to save time, have only entered one or two members of a household. Is there any way of automatically pulling in the census data for the other members of the household who are in the user's tree, then updating their My Ancestors page automatically?

 

For the most important censuses (1880/81) we use the information in the transcription anyway. Perhaps this feature could be introduced for those censuses only?