Search Feature Not Working Right

Tammy Lynn Driver

When I put dates in the boxes in the records search, I only want records between those 2 dates, not records 50 years either side! The search filters aren't paying attention to the years requested, even when the box for exact match only is checked. For example, I was doing a search for a marriage between 1900 and 1909. I got results for 1860. Only give me the dates I asked for!

How do I get the search to pay attention to my dates? Also, there needs to be a way to filter for the entirety of Europe, and filter out the US results, without having to search countries one at a time.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The top-level filter group for places includes "Continental Europe" and "United Kingdom and Ireland".

Keep in mind, though, that in addition to ignoring your date inputs, Search also often reports false information about locations: if a place field was indexed as plain text, then instead of showing you that text in the results list, it puts the text into the Places database's search field and shows you the top result of that. (The only part of it that's guaranteed to be anywhere near correct is the planet.)

Paul W

@Tammy Lynn Driver

Please provide an example and I'm sure you will be provided with advice on how to limit the search results in line with what you would anticipate - both with regards to location (Julia has already helped here) and date range.

Here is an illustration of how I got a return of just five results in searching for a marriage - all five for the inputted place and year:

(Ref. https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.givenName=john%20&q.givenName.exact=on&q.marriageLikeDate.from=1860&q.marriageLikeDate.to=1860&q.marriageLikePlace=surrey%2C%20england&q.marriageLikePlace.exact=on&q.surname=burton&q.surname.exact=on)

Update - just tried with the period you mentioned (1900-09) and got the following:

As I suggest, please illustrate an example where this does not work.

Tammy Lynn Driver

There are no Klassovsky, exact spelling only, marriages anywhere in Europe. Births only, and only in Slovakia. There should be some in the Ukraine, but there aren't.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I'm sure there were lots of such marriages. They just haven't been indexed.

While the ongoing Slovakia Church Books indexing project is now tackling marriages and burials as well as baptisms, what has been available up to now -- and still represents the vast majority of the indexed records on FS -- is just the baptisms. And for Ukraine, we're lucky if there are images online; almost nothing has been indexed. (The exception is the records that have been transcribed on Carpathian Reflections, which started as an effort to sort the mess on FS of Greek Catholic registers from the Munkács diocese, but has branched out into every other type of record available for the area.)