Make it possible to use exact date of birth when searching!
Almost all Swedes who moved to America changed their names, both the first name and the family name. Often they kept some connection to their Swedish name, but there were also persons who took completely new names. And even those who kept a connection did it in different ways: Some changed to an American name that was rather alike, some changed the spelling so their name would be correctly pronounced by English spoken persons, some who had a Swedish name with a meaning tried to translate it to English.
This means that when I in the Swedish administration books find that an ancestors of mine had siblings who emigrated, it is extremely hard to find them at Family Search. But there is one thing that could help the search: If it was possible to use the exact date of birth in a search it would be possible to find them. Of course you wont find them in the census, as they don't include date of birth, but you could find a death certificate where you could see what name they used in America, and then you could use that name for searching in census.
An exact date of birth in combination with "Sweden" as place of birth - but no name - would give a reasonable number of matches to look up.
Comments
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Hi @MargaretaBjorck. There is a way to search on an exact date: standardize the date on the person's Family Tree profile, and let the Research Hints system do its magic.
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Why can't you search for an exact birth year without a family tree, or a place of birth. If I knew all that stuff I wouldn't have to try an exact birth year search.
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Now I have spent the holiday building a tree to put my emigrated and disappeared relatives in the tree. I have standardized their dates and place of birth. But that method doesn't give any matches in the US Death Index! The only matches you can get are if those persons already are members of a family tree that somebody else has built. And in this case they aren't.
So I still wonder: Why doesn't Family Search makes it possible to do a search based upon exact date of birth in the US Death Index? And how could I reach them to tell them they should? It can't be a problem to have two alternative panels: one for those who wants to search a person with an exact date of birth and another panel for those who wants to search from a range of birth year.
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A death index was likely sorted by death date not birth date - so you should search it by death date for best results. If birth date was indexed then yes it would be 'nice' to search by that. You can filter search results by Date but the ability to search by Date largely seems to be 'removed/non-functional'. If you want specific help - perhaps include some search particulars? Someone can then likely then run you through the search parameters as an example. As far as Birth parameters having a birth date range rather than specific date - you can input the exact year in both fields (but we are told the search doesn't return results based on these dates anyway - disappointing/unusual).
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At one time one could specify (input) an exact date of birth, but we were then advised this never actually functioned - i.e., the search engine only checked for the year regardless of our input!
I believe it is wishful thinking to expect FamilySearch to finally adopt this popular idea.
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@MargaretaBjorck, regarding the "US Death Index" that you mention: I'm guessing you mean the Social Security Death Index. This only contains information for people who had a Social Security number, which was by no means everybody until very recently. (I think they became universally required what, thirty-some years ago?) In the early years, it was only wage-earning citizens who ever really had a number, i.e. most women and retirees didn't get one, and neither did many immigrants. This may explain why you aren't finding your relatives in this index.
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