• Only registered members can see all the forums - if you've received an invitation to join (it'll be on your My Summary page) please register NOW!

  • If you're looking for the LostCousins site please click the logo in the top left corner - these forums are for existing LostCousins members only.
  • This is the LostCousins Forum. If you were looking for the LostCousins website simply click the logo at the top left.
  • It's easier than ever before to check your entries from the 1881 Census - more details here

Ancestry search

Carla

Carla

LostCousins Star
I thought I would just throw this out there, and ask a probably very daft question. :oops:

If you use Ancestry, how many pages do you look at before you 'give up' looking for details of an ancestor?

I know the records that show up can vary depending on what information you put in the 'search', and most of the time I am fortunate in that I have entered enough information for relevant records to show up on the first page, or the second at a push. Sometimes I have used the wild card to help, and strategically placing the * within a name can often show up records I would probably never have found normally, but recently I have found myself scrolling down pages much further on, as I wonder if I am missing details by stopping my search too early?

I have been researching my line for a few years now but wonder if I have got into some bad sloppy habits? Fresh eyes, more experience, hints, tips and advice would be gratefully received.
 
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.
 
Carla said:
I thought I would just throw this out there, and ask a probably very daft question. :oops:

If you use Ancestry, how many pages do you look at before you 'give up' looking for details of an ancestor?
Click to expand...

I suppose it depends on how desperate you are to find them, using the filters at the left hand side of the page is handy. Make sure when you are entering the details on the search page that you scroll down to the bottom of the page to comfirm you are only searching in the country you need to search in. Sometimew less is more, especially in census searches, start with what you know to be true and if that doesn't bring results, broaden the search by removing one item at a time, if you stick to let's say the year of birth, it may have been mistranscribed or misheard by the enumerator, so leave it out from the search and see if you get a better result. The number of mistranscribed surnames I have found over the years is amazing, only this week I found an Arkwright family in the 1851 census listed as Harkregtt !! no amount of *'s would have found that, I just entered the first name, birth year -/+ 2 years, county and then trawled through pages and pages until I found it. I have to admit, I am a bit of a dog with a bone when it comes to searching, I hate giving up, but sometimes you just have to admit defeat.
 
Alexander Bisset said:
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.
Click to expand...

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

I am already using this feature but I think it could be because I said I was happy to trial certain new filters, etc. To be honest sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. For example, if I have already found my ancestor in a particular census then that census will not appear in my searches but shows up at the top of the list of results that come up. But, saying that, I have had census results listed in my search even when my ancestor has already been added to my tree with that census as source information!
 
Alexander Bisset said:
Are you sure I don't think that feature is properly live yet. It may be it was during WDYTYA Live.
Click to expand...

I've been using it for a bit now, but maybe they're having teething issues.
Carla said:
To be honest sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. For example, if I have already found my ancestor in a particular census then that census will not appear in my searches but shows up at the top of the list of results that come up. But, saying that, I have had census results listed in my search even when my ancestor has already been added to my tree with that census as source information!
Click to expand...
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.
 
Alexander Bisset said:
You can always double click on a person in FTAnalyzer and have it automatically search Ancestry or Findmypast for you :)
Click to expand...

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 use a variety of techniques including FMP first for census search. I often start BMD with a free search because otherwise I doubt myself from the good old days when it was all I had access to!! My favourite Ancestry feature is often probate records it has just proved invaluable with a family that changed first names and place of birth on every census!! The wildly off surname variation or transcription is my nemesis as well.
 
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top