Family Historian User Group

If you had your way, what would you change at the genealogical venues you frequent?

My current peeve is Ancestry's search engine. If I could buy the company, I would change the whole way the search results are presented to the user. There would be explicit statements for each data set about what fields exist and which are actually indexed.

Instead of having misleading statements about match quality I would let the user tell the search engine how heavily to weigh each field.

I would also let the user sort the page of search results by the fields (e.g. for a census, the columns might be birth year, birthplace, occupation).

And the results would be downloadable so the user wouldn't have to go through the rigamarole of scraping them off to save them.

Jan

ID:2862

On the specific subject of Ancestry's search facilities (not sure downloadable helps much; you'll still have to copy them off whatever you've downloaded it to to record them). My favourite gripes...

1. Allow '*' in the first 3 letters. I often know how the end of a surname name will be spelt, but the beginning varies. They say that will give me too many results, so instead I leave it out and have to browse a much longer list.

2. Search for a pair of names at a marriage reference.

Both almost trivial to implement and would save me a lot of time and them a lot of bandwidth.

But my pet hate is FreeBMD's patronising attitude to anyone who might dare to suggest a correction, as compared to Ancestry who encourage and thank you for it.

I have sent numerous corrections to FreeBMD and have always had a courteous reply. Don’t forget that all the people involved are volunteers.

Although the search on FreeBMD is currently slow (because of its popularity) the presentation of results is clear and its free! Also, I notice that the database now extends well into the 1920’s, so that it will soon rival all the other GRO indexes.

Gerry

I share Gerry's experience. In fact I didn't think that they would accept my most recent correction which concerned an illegible page no for a marriage ref. I happened to know the spouse, where the page number was clear and told them so. I though that they didn't accept circumstantial evidence, but I've just had an email saying that it has been accepted!

I do take Chris's point though in that they try to discourage frivolous or timewasting corrections - I think they've had bad experiences in the past!

It's a while since I've used FreeBMD, maybe they've imroved. Nevertheless I'm informed in bold red that I 'must read the following points below BEFORE submitting a correction'. The following being 18 points including the word NOT in capitals 13 times (among others)... It's not designed to give the impression that they appreciate your help.

I think the problem might be that for every careful, thorough researcher that only submits corrections based on alternative but valid evidence, there are a dozen others who submit what they either assume, hope or guess to be the correct entry based on assumption, guesswork or squinting at the screen a bit harder than the original transcriber did. The mess of 'alternative names' and 'stickies' on Ancestry (where, as has been pointed out, it is a free-for-all) would appear to bear this out, with a number of census entries I have looked at having up to six different alternative names - clearly these are guesses and not always helpful when searching.

I have great respect for the FreeBMD team and their volunteers; despite some of the shortcomings they have easily saved me hundreds and hundreds of hours of searching the indexes in person, and allowed me to search for events I would not normally have bothered with because of the sheer time required to find them.

I find it hard to imagine that only eight years ago when I started my research there was not one census online (the 1881 was available on CD), searching the census meant hours in front of a microfiche (assuming you knew the correct town or city) and searching the indexes in London was the special horror of fighting to get the quarter you wanted, trying to protect the eight inches of desk space you'd managed to find and trying desperately not to hit the little old ladies over the head with volumes weighing half a ton!

So what I'd like to see are medals for all those people who have given up their time and spent so much effort in providing free transcriptions of censuses, vital records, BMDs, MIs, etc., just to make my life easier (and possibly save a little old lady too).

Oh, and it wouldn't go amiss if the pay sites sorted their act out too [grin]

I have great respect (and gratitude) for FreeBMD's volunteers too (in fact, my wife did it for about a year... she's a better typist than me). And my original remark was meant more lightheartedly than it seems to have been taken, sorry.

But I do think at an official level they tend to loose track of what they're doing it for... that is, to help people trace their families. Their stated objective of producing an accurate transcription of the GRO indexes complete with all their known mistakes and omissions seems pointless to me except as an academic exercise.

I prefer Ancestry's more relaxed approach which says that if you think this name might be mis-transcribed, that information might help someone find it. They'll have to make their own judgement about whether they agree with you of course.

I agree with Chris, I prefer Ancestry's approach.

I have submitted loads of corrections to Ancestry and as a result I have been contacted by two family members and two unrelated people who were looking at others I corrected who were living in the same place as my family (including the wonderfully named Harper Twelvetrees who is incorrectly transcribed in the 1851 census).  By contrast I have sent only a couple of corrections to FreeBMD and have never had any response.  When I submit corrections to Ancestry I put some evidence in the comments field, usually references to other censuses for the same family so anyone looking at my correction can decide whether they agree with my correction.

Two things I would like Ancestry to improve on.  When the surname is incorrectly transcribed I would like the correction be applied to all family members, currently you have to submit the correction for each one.  One of my ancestors were called Day and this was wrongly read as Do (for Ditto), so the transcriber entered the surname for the family above them for all ten of my family.  Secondly I would like to be able to enter corrections to ages and places of birth, at the moment all you can do is add these as comments

I just wish the pay sites would get it right and sort out the error's. We're paying enough, it's a wonder Trading Standards haven't looked in to this.

I want to second the comment that satyricon said about Ancestry 'stickies' -- for two census records in my husband's family, people have 'corrected' things which were not wrong!

In one family, a daughter was left off the main page and appears on a supplemental page for the entire county. There are margin notes which refer back to the main page and the family numbers make it quite clear which family she belongs to on the other page. There are big sine-wave squiggles on the supplemental page separating the individuals. Any human looking at this page can see at a glance what has happened. But there is a 'correction' because some dolt has attached the daughter to the family above her on the supplemental page! I've left a counter-correction but who knows if anyone will read it.

In another case, a married woman who is a head-of-household has been given the name of her mother.

Let's see if I can explain this without making a big muddle. I have a wedding announcement with three surnames in it.

Surname #1 is the daughter's maiden name.
Surname #2 is her mother's second husband.
Surname #3 is the daughter's husband.

The announcement reads 'Mr & Mrs [surname 2] ... wedding of their daughter [Surname #1] to groom's name [surname 3] etc. etc.'

Go forward a few decades, and I find the bride in the census without her husband. She is the head of household, and appears with all her children, with the groom's [surname 3] as one might expect.

In this household is an elderly woman whose relation to the head of household is listed as 'mother' with a Surname #4.

This could be:

A: her mother-in-law or
B: her own mother, remarried yet again

There is a sticky which assigns Surname #4 to the head-of-household!

I can't think of any scenario by which a married woman would take on her stepfather's name or her mother-in-law's married name. This is just plain wrong.
The only way my bride could have surname 4 as her maiden name would be if the man who had surname one was also a stepfather, and I have no evidence for that.

But some busybody has come along and assumed that surname 4 is her maiden name, and assigned it in a sticky with no evidence to back it up.

Jan

Jan,

Don't treat them as 'corrections', just possible alternative names. The point being that they appear in the search if that's who you thought you were looking for, otherwise you might never find them.

Also, it may not be 'some busybody'. Ancestry's software generates alternative names automatically from the transcription (which doesn't include wavy lines and marginal notes) where the relationships suggest them. I find this occasionally helpful, and where obviously wrong, you can simply ignore them.

Having spent nearly an hour yesterday trying - and failing - to submit a correction on freebmd, I'm not going to say what I think about their attitude to corrections!

I agree with most of the suggestions about ancestry. My top one would be being able to sort search results.

I don't particularly want to bang on about this, as everybody has certainly made valid points, but the FreeBMD philosophy is that there are a number of 'stages' of their development (three, I think). I can't recall what they are exactly, but having read it through once on a wet afternoon it basically says all errors will be caught and corrected in stages 2 and 3 when differences caught by double-keying, etc., will be investigated. I suppose how successful this will be remains to be seen.