Not enough room here to write question but how could the 2 jpg's below happen???

BRIAN LAKE

Áine Ní Donnghaile

Unfortunately, your images are not (yet) showing, @BRIAN LAKE

FYI - where you wrote "not enough room" is just for the title. You can post a long message of many paragraphs in the body space of the message, along with images.

BRIAN LAKE

Just trying to find out how it could happen that doing a search for an individual would only produce 3 results with no relationship to the search yet the person exists in your files?

Áine Ní Donnghaile

If a profile exists for a person in the FamilySearch tree, that does not necessarily mean there are indexed records in the database that pertain to that person or family.

It's estimated that less than 10% of all genealogically useful records are online. And only some of the records that are on FamilySearch have been indexed to make them searchable.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Elaborating a bit on Áine's answer: it's not coming up with the search result because you're searching in the wrong database.

The interfaces are confusingly (and annoyingly) nearly identical, but Search - Records (what you were using) searches indexed records, while Family Tree profiles (like what you were expecting to find) can be searched using Family Tree - Find or Search - Family Tree (two different menu items that go to the same place).

Gordon Collett

Just keep in mind that you Search Records to get records but you Find People to get people.

I want to address another aspect of your question, though, the "how it could happen that doing a search for an individual would only produce 3 results with no relationship to the search..."

I call this The Overly Helpful Computer syndrome. People tend to complain about it a lot. I just never leave the first page of search results and ignore the unhelpful helpfulness. It seems that the search engine does not really search for a combined match for our search criteria. It seems instead that the algorithm takes each part separately to compute a match score for each item, then combines them some way into a total score, then presents the results in the order of those scores from highest to lowest. I don't know if a perfect score is 6.0000 or 5.9999. Scores in the 5.0000 to 5.9998 range tend to be excellent. In the 4's are shaky. Below that you have to be pretty lucky to find some thing useful. You can see the scores by exporting search results through the Search Preferences side panel

Like many search engines, just in case something useful might come up, the bar for displaying a result is pretty low. It's like the program is designed to avoid saying "No Results" unless there is absolutely no other option. But I have to say that your search results are not something I have seen before. Recreating it and exporting the results gives this:

I have to wonder why matching just the first name and country managed to score as high as it did. The last name starting with S might have contributed a little bit.

And I really have to wonder why a result with a negative match score would ever display.

This type of searching is certainly not unique to FamilySearch. I always find it interesting and a bit strange when I do a Google with a couple of terms and the very first result has the little notation "does not contain ...." and the option is given to click "must contain ..." to redo the search.

BRIAN LAKE

I am not sure what happened for sure but it appeared that when I added the 2 pictures first rather than the text, it did not leave enough space to write a note so I sent the 2 pictures a second time putting the text in first.

genthusiast

How could it happen? Easily - the profile (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/9J49-N5V) shows SOURCES (0) and the search records input was apparently manually entered. Using the ANY Life Event can return seemingly random records. If you use her FamilySearch profile Search Records:

It will result in the following Search Results:

FamilySearch.org

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?treeref=9J49-N5V&q.givenName=Elizabeth&q.surname=Sharrard&q.givenName.1=Elizabeth&q.surname.1=Sharrad&q.givenName.2=Elizabeth&q.surname.2=Sheppard&q.givenName.3=Elizabeth&q.surname.3=Sherrard&q.birthLikePlace=Sidney%2C+Hastings%2C+Ontario%2C+Canada&q.birthLikeDate.from=1786&q.birthLikeDate.to=1790&q.deathLikePlace=Frontenac%2C+Ontario%2C+Canada&q.deathLikeDate.from=1870&q.deathLikeDate.to=1874&q.marriageLikePlace=Canada&q.marriageLikeDate.from=1804&q.marriageLikeDate.to=1808

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I also attempted a couple minimal searches - that hopefully might help:

FamilySearch.org

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&exactSearching=true&q.anyDate.from=1780&q.anyDate.to=1790&q.anyPlace=Canada&q.recordCountry=Canada&q.recordSubcountry=Canada%2COntario&q.surname=Sharrad

Discover your family history. Explore the world’s largest collection of free family trees, genealogy records and resources.

FamilySearch.org

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.anyDate.from=1780&q.anyDate.to=1790&q.anyPlace=Canada&q.recordCountry=Canada&q.recordSubcountry=Canada%2COntario&q.surname=Sharr%2A

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There don't seem to be many records with just the Sharrad surname - so possibly records were indexed with a different spelling, or perhaps there are not many records from the timeframe/location (at least on FamilySearch)?

Mike357

@BRIAN LAKE,

I'm sorry that you're having trouble with the Search engine. I've looked at your search have just a couple of comments that may help.

• sometimes, less is more. If you're having problems finding things in Sidney, Hastings, Ontario, Canada; you might want to remove the township and just start with Hastings, or even just Ontario.
• Since you know the married name of Elizabeth, you might also consider adding an alternate name: Elizabeth Lake.

I tried reproducing your search with some of these changes, and came up with several more results. You'll have to decide if the approach gives you more (and better) results or not. But, here's a link to my search results. You'll see some results for Sidney township.

Hope it helps.

FamilySearch.org

https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.anyDate.from=1786&q.anyDate.to=1886&q.anyPlace=Hastings%2C%20Ontario%2C%20Canada&q.fatherGivenName=William&q.fatherSurname=Sharrard&q.givenName=Elizabeth&q.givenName.1=Elizabeth&q.recordCountry=Canada&q.spouseGivenName=John&q.spouseSurname=Lake&q.surname=Sharrard&q.surname.1=Lake

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