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This new format is awful! Put it back the way it was!

Donnarose Russian
Donnarose Russian ✭
September 29, 2021 edited May 25, 2022 in Suggest an Idea

I can't figure out how to do anything on here now. It used to be great, but now I get very few results and what little bit I do find is impossible to navigate. No new features are helpful at all. There's no info about how to easily use anything. It's so hard, it's no longer worth it to even come to this site. I feel cheated now after I've done so much work to edit Family Search's existing records here and trying to save all these records. I can't find anything now. Why, Family Search. 😡

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New · Last Updated September 29, 2021

Comments

  • Barry Howard
    Barry Howard ✭
    September 29, 2021

    Yes I feel the same. The new changes are awful. I doubt they will listen to us though, we're only the website users, we don't count.

    The same complaints were voiced 20 years ago when they changed from a website format that everyone was comfortable with to the complicated format you've been using up till now. Everyone pleaded with the administrators to revert back to the original back then but they didn't listen. They won't listen now either.

    Cheers

    4
  • Joan Wieser
    Joan Wieser ✭
    September 29, 2021

    It looks to me like you have someone new in the design department that is taking their cue from Ancestry. I've been working on this site since it was first available and this has to be the worst design yet. The idea should be to make access to what clients are looking for as easy as possible. You've just made it as difficult as Ancestry has. Funny how I've commented on that Ancestry website that they should be using yours as an example. I would venture to guess that for the majority of us we do not have the time or inclination to page through a hundred pages or more of results. Having been working in genealogy for 47 years I know where to go to get what I need. You've just made that almost impossible.

    Also, we might see the first page of the results but anything more than that it has taken me hitting the reload button at least 3 times.

    4
  • ericgills
    ericgills ✭
    May 21, 2022

    The uk census records are presented in a way that makes it impossible to get all the members of a house hold listed together bring back the old format please

    2
  • Paul W
    Paul W ✭✭✭✭✭
    May 21, 2022 edited May 21, 2022

    @ericgills

    I have been working with FamilySearch England & Wales census records for the past ten years and can assure you there has been no recent change.

    The reason families can be divided is due to the different reference numbers assigned to records that appear on a different page of the census. So, if mother, father and two children appear at the bottom of one page in the original they will have a common reference and thus appear together. The remaining members of the family, shown at the top of the next page, will have a reference assigned accordingly, so they will never appear together, as one household, as in the records found on other websites.

    It is also true that there is an inconsistency (which I can only partly explain) whereby each household member is sometimes recorded as an individual, even when they all do appear on the same page of the original document. This is understandable with the 1841 census, as the whole page is usually treated (in the original) as if one household. Without any dividing lines on the page, the alternative would be for everyone to be indexed as being in the same household - even though they might belong to the same family, or even live in the same property. However, I have seen families indexed one-by-one (rather than by household) in other census collections (possibly just for 1851) for no apparent reason.

    Whatever the circumstances, the main point here is that I do not see this as a problem that has occurred only since the recent change to the format of the interface - the subject under general discussion in this thread. Under FamilySearch's current way of providing citation references against individuals (rather than households), I do not see there is a solution to the problem you have raised.

    1
  • Ray Batig
    Ray Batig ✭
    May 23, 2022

    When you consider that it is the same programmers that do FamilySearch and Ancestry why would you expect anything different. They never ask the uses they just change. Also they never test our the changes before they are implemented. Ancestry controls all of this and it is going down hill faster and faster

    2
  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    May 24, 2022

    @Ray Batig, Ancestry does not share any programmers or any other employees with FamilySearch, and has no control over FS. They're completely separate entities, and very different -- one is a for-profit business, the other is a church-funded service.

    3
  • TGLA123
    TGLA123 ✭
    May 25, 2022

    I agree with everyone here, the lack of granular search results, the lack of fine tuning your results, or even just to provide the 'exact' results as requested is insane.

    The engineers must be using this scrolling social media advertising business model. It SUCKS FOR RESEARCH!

    I am not going to scroll through hundreds of pages! This isn't Facebook!

    It just makes no sense why you take resarch features away.

    WHY DO YOU TAKE FEATURES AWAY AND MAKE SEARCHING 10 TIMES HARDER?

    HOW IS THIS AN IMPROVEMENT?!?!

    5
  • Gryf
    Gryf ✭
    May 25, 2022

    Completely agree, the new format is horrible, none of the results are narrowed to my search, very user unfriendly

    4
  • Gloria Grace Cantu
    Gloria Grace Cantu ✭
    May 29, 2022

    New format slower than molasses

    1
  • Anne-Kathrine Henriksen
    Anne-Kathrine Henriksen ✭✭
    May 30, 2022 edited May 30, 2022

    Sorry, I am not sure if this discussion is about searching records, but if it is, I would say I think it works just as fine as the old one. I always search by country though. Even if the name is incomplete and the spelling is wrong, the top search result is a match.

    image.png

    Kindly, Anne-Kathrine Henriksen

    0
  • Cheryl Viering
    Cheryl Viering ✭✭✭
    May 31, 2022

    The search is pretty much useless for records from the 1700's. Especially when the country at the time, no longer exists. I've given up searching records because all I ever get is lots of ridiculously wrong hits, and very rarely find the correct one, no matter how many pages I scroll through.

    2
  • ADaniels
    ADaniels ✭
    June 23, 2022

    Horrible can’t see record I was sent to this site to see. Done with family search

    1
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