* TIP Ancestry search criteria

[Gowermick]

Everyone knows Ancestry is US Centric, so one's search criteria needs some adjustment for it to return meaningful results.

I just Searched for a baptism in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England ( name was suggested by Ancestry as I typed), I got no results, as the baptism had been entered as Bromsgrove, Worcester, England

What is more confusing, is that I found it by just entering Worcestershire, England!!
This means tha Ancestry knew Bromsgrove was in Worcestershire, so why the first search failed, is beyond me.

I came to the conclusion that it is sometimes better leaving the place of birth out altogether

[Martin Tolley]

Have in the past experienced similar oddities with my families in Somerset, Dorset and Devon - which mostly don't have -shire in the name, but sometimes in some records the -shire is present. It also happens with local useage with my wife's families where churches say they are in Northampton, but really they are in Northamptonshire.

[GeneSniper]

Just a suggestion as I am not sure how Ancestry works with wildcards, could you not enter Northampton* and let Ancestry look for all variations of Northampton even misspellings eg shir or shre I may be sending you wrong information for Ancestry but maybe worth a try.

[Martin Tolley]

William
I've gotten used to trying all sorts of manual and auto variations over the years. In my experience Ancestry needs a lot of guess and punt. A more significant issue is that I seem to be blessed with forebears who not only couldn't (or chose not to) spell their names correctly but who discarded their birth names for ones not remotely similar. How you get from Lionel Arthur to Jim, or Constance Arabella to Bunty are still mysteries in search of solutions. In the case of Lionel Arthur (my father) he'd apparently always been called Jim, and HE didn't know why. He actually only found out that Lionel was his name on his first day in school!

[AdrianBruce]

... I got no results, as the baptism had been entered as Bromsgrove, Worcester, England. What is more confusing, is that I found it by just entering Worcestershire, England!! ...

Yeah well, that looks like FamilySearch for you - the ones that I found entered as Bromsgrove, Worcester, England were all in England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975, which is the indexes supplied by FamilySearch.

You might get there faster by using "Worcestershire, England" as the "Birth" location and also putting "Bromsgrove" into the Keyword box. I really like that box - you can find all sorts of stuff using it that, for some reason, doesn't show up in a "proper" index search. Conversely, you presumably have to know that there's something missing to go down this route.

I have never yet worked out how Ancestry indexes its place-names - there's something going on under the hood because occasionally I see things like "Bromsgrove123" - but what's happening I don't know. I am fairly certain, however, that it really isn't just indexing by text values.

[paultt]

AdrianBruce wrote:I have never yet worked out how Ancestry indexes its place-names - there's something going on under the hood because occasionally I see things like "Bromsgrove123" - but what's happening I don't know. I am fairly certain, however, that it really isn't just indexing by text values.

I know that FamilySearch and possibly Ancestry are working towards what they call 'Place Name Standardisation' where they are trying to get correct place names by date range and then the user selects the most appropriate place to go into the displayed record by dropdowns. For example Cape Town in South Africa can be standardised as 1657-1806 Cape Town, Cape of Good Hope, South Africa; 1806-1910 Cape Town, Cape Colony, South Africa; 1910-1994 Cape Town, Cape Province, South Africa; 1994- todate Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, and the Afrikaans variants of the above, ie 1806-1910 Kapp Stad, Kaapse Colonie, etc, etc. Each of these 8 should all point to the same physical place as identified by the same latitude and longitude. Sounds good! The display program used in FS uses this one South Africa table and an algorithm to display the correct place from the records that have been transcribed from the original records. Very good in theory. I am on a team that is trying to correct these as and when we can.
However, the various Indexing teams are told to index exactly what they see on each batch of records from a catalog or collection, and each transcription is verified by at least one other person before the records are released for publication to the user viewable databases. In general the indexers are NOT allowed to use their local knowledge and correct the place in the transcription. So, for example if a marriage record has the town written as P.E, cape, they cannot change it to Port Elizabeth, Cape Colony, South Africa or Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa. It has to stay as P.E, cape. The display program and its algorithm have fun with this, and I have corrected quite a few where the marriage place was shown as Peru, Chile. Huh? It is a bit of a minefield at the moment, and it is going to get a lot worse before i gets any better!
Lessons to be learned from this: Once you have found your record, view the actual image, don't trust the transcriptions. When you enter the place into your family tree, whether it be on Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage or on your Family Historian, please enter the full place name of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England, United Kingdom, and not just the Bromsgrove ,Worcs, as you are familiar with the name. If you export your gedcom with lots of incomplete or familiar place names to Ancestry, Familysearch or any of the others, you could be compounding the problems that we see today.

[trevorrix]

I almost never use the Location field when searching places. I use the Keyword field instead and receive accurate results.