I am increasingly finding that the search comes up with absolutely ridiculous results. For example I'm currently looking for info on an ancestor born in 1705 and at the top of the results list I have 2 1891 censuses, followed by 3 1901 censuses! Further down page one are several results from 1911, and it doesn't even have the "Note: These records are less likely to match your search but may be helpful." message before them!
Why can't the search parameters be altered so that anything after maybe 120 years of the birth year was eliminated?
I also find that some results come up 2 or 3 times; when you look at the image they are the same. This gets annoying after a while.
|
Unfortunately, when Ancestry drastically changed the search function, they made a real mess of it in my opinion. Your best bet to find people in the census is to use Familysearch.org. So far they have not messed things up.
|
I have to agree that the search changes now give inconsistent and random results. I have mastered the current search functions in spite of my preference for Old Search but the lack of good results is extremely annoying.
I have been using the California Birth and Marriage Indexes a lot lately. With the Birth Index if you put in a First name, last name and middle initial you will often NOT get results that have a middle name written out. Omitting the middle initial often gives many, many results and requires much scrolling to pick out the correct one.
With the marriage index often the result shows up if you search the husband but if you search the wife who showed up with the husband the record doesn't come up. Not very helpful if you only know the maiden name of the wife.
Familysearch.org gives much better results but searching each category separately gets a little tedious. I did not have this problem with Ancestry before the search was changed.
What other records are we not getting with the current search that we don't know about?
Barbara
|
After using this site for over 10 years I am beginning to wonder why I am paying them £150 a year, when I end up having to use Free BMD.org for BMD look ups as to many records are missing here.
Family search, Findmypast and even genes reunited all of which I can search on for free!!!
|
I am in complete agreement and sympathy with you. For instance, I entered a nephew's information including all but his birthdate. The search informed me that no records existed for this nephew. Now why would his name not appear on 1990, 2000, or 2010 census records. When I search for a birth record, the search engine cannot provide it even though I entered his place of birth. It seems to me the only information Ancestry collects is the information that we, the users, provide. Nearly everything I have collected comes from other member trees because they provided the information. The Ancestry search seems useless.
|
In searching for a birth date for a nephew born around 1980 in Alabama, the search engine shows me records of people from the 1700s from every state but Alabama. I'd like to know how a search like this produces results where the only common feature is their name.
|
While I agree that the search results are a mess, the reason you can't find your nephew has nothing to do with that.
The last census that was released was 1940. It's something like 70 years before census information is made public by the government.
also many states have privacy laws that prevent recent records from being made public. Except for a few cases, it's very rare that you will find information on living people on Ancestry.
|
The census for the year 1950 will be released in 2022-well after I am gone to my reward. The rule is after 72 years-so the 1940 census was released in 2012. Some state census records do not follow that rule. The Florida state census for 1945 is available. I don't know about other states but as the other poster explained, privacy laws prevent really current records from being released.
|
Thanks. I was not aware of that.
|