Recent Changes to FamilySearch Record Search are horrible! Change It Back Now!
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Can we search the old way on familysearch??? I waste a lot of time searching for what I need.
Patsy Becker
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@EdwinReffell2 I suspect what you are referring to is not the search tool itself, but the continuing unrepaired problems with standardised place names that cause indexed records to be connected to the wrong place. Most recently vast numbers of places have suddenly become :
Calendar, Idaho, Idaho, United States
when they are nowhere near; not even in the same country. It seems plausible that somebody has accidentally done some serious damage to the place name indexes during the recent updates.
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@Re Searching not so much "somebody" as "something" - the placename algorithm.
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@EdwinReffell2's examples are of two different indexings of the same image, one with the correct place of Fareham, Hampshire, England (per the catalog), the other with, uh, not the correct place, in Northamptonshire. The latter is very likely the fault of the autostandardization bot, but unfortunately, FS's current "solution" to that problem is disguise/obfuscation, so nobody can say for sure. (The index probably originally had an "event place" that included the name of the church, which the bot associated with a random other church with that name.)
In any case, Edwin's problem has absolutely nothing to do with either the zombie thread or the comment that revived it.
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Record Search has not changed in over two years : https://www.familysearch.org/search/
The All Collections search has recently been given pride-of-place, and perhaps you have been trying to use that?
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Re the Elizabeth Reffell baptisms. I have this vague and therefore possibly incorrect idea that we have seen stuff from Hampshire mapped to the wrong county before. I looked for "obvious" failure modes like two different parishes on the same film, but nothing useful appeared - so far as I could see, it's all mapped off the same film with no other parishes on that film. However, I think there is a perhaps crazy way in which the auto-placename-standardisation bot may be implicated. My diagnostics are hampered by the fact that we are not allowed to see Event-Place-Original any more. Even assuming it still exists…
@N Tychonievich - can your contacts put this on the list to look at in case there is an issue here? Thanks
Background - the baptism of Elizabeth Reffell took place on 23 October 1763 at Fareham, Hampshire, England.
It was indexed first of all in the collection England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975. That index record contains the batch number C06306-1 (aka C063061) which is how I'm confident that the baptism was at Fareham, Hampshire. This index gives the correct placename of Fareham, Hampshire, England.
The baptism was then indexed again in the collection England, Hampshire, Portsmouth, Baptisms, 1538-1940. Date and parents are the same. The affiliate is Portsmouth History Centre. All of this indicates that it really is the same event. But the placename is St Peter St Paul And St Andrew's Cathedral, Peterborough, Northamptonshire, England, United Kingdom. 263 km away, apparently…
Why do I think the auto-placename bot might be involved? Because according to the FS Placenames Database, Hampshire has an alternative name of Hamtunscīr. (Anglo-Saxon, I think.) And Northamptonshire has an alternative name of Hamtunscire. Err - kind of close.
Has the 99.9% match in alternative names for Hampshire and Northamptonshire got anything to do with the incorrect pickup of a place in Northamptonshire instead of Hampshire?
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@Adrian Bruce1 Unfortunately, N Tychonievich has been told to discontinue reporting these issues as the team has sufficient examples of the problem. This thread is the only place I've seen that information.
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Thanks @Áine Ní Donnghaile - I guess it was good while it lasted…
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As other community members have mentioned, the record search has not changed in over 2 years. This is an old discussion being revived. We will be closing this thread. If any new information comes to light please create a new discussion.
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