Simple questions on searching
Newbie here so please be kind with any reply. Notwithstanding the many questions and complaints on the search interface which I've recently read and I agree with, I have a couple of basic questions on when search results are returned.
- Why are the results returned in no particular order, and why is it not possible to sort those results by their column headings, eg alphabetically by name, by date, or by category of source record to make them more useful?
- Why , when often the results are in the hundreds or thousands, is the default set to just 20 results per page? And why cannot a higher default be set permanently by the user?
Best Answer
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The basic reason/answer for both questions is that FamilySearch has not implemented/programmed those options into the search results page. You can request/suggest these ideas at:
https://community.familysearch.org/en/categories/suggest-an-idea
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Answers
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I raely get hundreds of results, let alone thousands. The essential thing is to search for one thing at a time (whether it be a birth, marriage, death, or where the person was resident in a particular census year), checking the fields as "Exact" (as far as possible) and filtering on "Type" of record.
In the example below, I searched for any William Brown found in New Hampshire in the 1920 US census. I got just 15 results:
For a William Brown born in New Hampshire between 1890 and 1910 I am given 28 results, albeit only one of these being an actual birth record, the rest being mainly assorted census records for individuals named William Brown, born 1890-1910:
By searching just on record types (see bottom right of search page) or Collection (top left of page - clicking on which produces a menu on the right side) you can narrow your searches still further.
As "genthusiast" suggests, place any additional suggestions for interface enhancements via the link provided.
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Hi Paul,
I understand your answer, but perhaps I should clarity my question. I'm not referring to situations where one is searching for a named individual, but rather a search for the incidence of a particular surname in a location, in my case usually a town in Lancashire, in order to try and establish families and then better understand inter family relationships.
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Sorry I didn't really grasp the nature of your comments.
I think what you are trying to achieve will depend on any specific period you might be looking at. For example, my father's family lived in the Sunderland area from about 1810 to the mid-1930s. So, if I want to find instances of our surname in the census returns I would input my surname in the "Last Name" field and "Durham" in the Residence field - adding, say, "1851 - 1851" for the time period, check the "Exact" boxes and would then get a list of all the individuals of that name who were recorded in the 1851 census. (Alternatively, you can make a search from directly within the 1851 England & Wales collection - accessible from the search page at https://www.familysearch.org/search/.
Going further back, you can search on time spans for instances of your family surnames in Lancashire. It is best to search on just one event at a time (say christening/birth, marriage, or death/burial), or you will be overwhelmed by the randomly presented number of results.
However, I feel your problem will definitely lie with your wanting the results in a particular order - either date or place - so you might have to export them to a spreadsheet to sort them according to your needs. Unfortunately, I have no experience of working in this way, so hopefully another user might give some advice on this.
Incidentally, I have carried out work on two projects related to Lancashire: one on the ancestry of L S Lowry, the other on my Lancashire cousins' Sherburn family. FamilySearch has a reasonable amount of Lancashire-related material, but I think you will probably need to work from within other websites (Find My Past and Ancestry are free to use at many public libraries) in order to find the best program that will be of best help in relation to your particular methods of research.
See https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.anyDate.from=1800&q.anyDate.to=1830&q.anyPlace=durham%2C%20england&q.anyPlace.exact=on&q.surname=lathan&q.surname.exact=on for an example of my searching for instances of the LATHAN surname in County Durham in the 1800-1830 period. Click on "Preferences" to see if these options might be of help in sorting the results of similar searches you might undertake within FamilySearch. I must admit, I have never felt the need to carry out my personal research in this way, but I believe other users make a lot of use of spreadsheets.
Would anything like this be of use to you?
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Hi Paul,
Thanks for this very interesting and considered reply. The example you helpfully provided, which I studied with interest, clearly illustrates the point I was making within my question. The results returned from your query, at first glance, seem to imply some sort of structured sequence from the FamilySearch database(s), with the census returns results listed in date order. However a further scroll through the listing shows further census results reappearing in a more random order. In other words there appears to be no order to the sequencing of information returned.
Whilst in your example I could drill down further by the use of additional filters, eg by census year, however this then negates the whole purpose of the exercise, which is to see a broad spectrum of the family name across a fairly wide time frame. If the data was sortable, family patterns would be easily visible within listings.
I accept that the answer to this is as you advise, to download the data into excel and then use excel's sort functions to reassemble the rows by relevant sort keys. It works fine and I've used it a few times, but it's a very cumbersome way of analysing query data, not least because of the many additional LDS fields that get extracted with each data dump.
You mention Ancestry and Find my Past. I actually subscribe to both resources, and maintain my family tree within both systems. As a general observation and its only my opinion but I find that Find my Past is much better engineered than either Ancestry or FamilySearch. Any search results returned from Ancestry, just like FamilySearch, cannot be sorted. Find my Past allows data sorting across all relevant columns, which means that you can work with a larger download and then sort it to see either family patterns or locate mis-transcribed individuals.
At the end of the day I'll just keep working using all three resources. Perhaps one day in a later upgrade the FamilySearch search engine might adopt a more user controllable interface which will allow users to interrogate the data without the need to use excel.
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