please go back to the system of searching people
In the previous times one could do a "parent search" and quickly find the children of a couple sometimes with just the names of the parents. But especially if a place or date or time frame was included in the search.
Now there are too many options displayed and the searcher is baffled by the enormity of the chore! The complexity of the system has made it so difficult for my sister to help patrons that she is not sure if she can take the compliment I gave her, "You help so many people."
It is the same with a marriage search and a birth with parameters of place and date. Too many options to choose from. Sometimes none match the person one is looking for.
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The ability to search by just parents is still there. Yes, there's more clicking and scrolling (and have I mentioned scrolling? Oh, and there's lots of scrolling), but a search with the main name fields left completely blank will return both children indexed with a surname and those indexed without.
Searches by place are a different matter. While the ability to input placenames as parameters is still there (after some extra clicks and scrolling), the database of indexed records has unfortunately been corrupted by autostandardization to such a degree that I do not find it useful to search by place, nor to filter by place. The records I'm looking for may now be filed under the wrong continent. If I know the location where an event should be recorded, then I look for that place in the Catalog and either use the magnifying glass icon next to the film I want to check, or, if it's a new index that's not indicated in the Catalog, then I copy the film number, scroll down on the Search - Records input box, and use the "Image Group Number or ..." field.
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As Julia has said, there is still the same ability to find children by searching on the parents - I recently provided an example of this on this forum. I know other users have found making searches to have become far more complex, but this has not been my general experience.
With regard to searches including a placename, make sure you always add a wildcard at the end of the location. Again, I even had problems with finding records using the old page. For example,I would get no results if I entered just "Sunderland" in the placename field, but the ones anticipated if I inputted "Sunderland*". "Sunderland, Durham" would work in most cases, but (again as Julia comments) the autostandardization program has meant many records are now classified as being for places with the same location name, but halfway across the world**. Generally, the wildcard example helps combat this problem, though not if the place has been "autostandardized" as something completely different, of course.
In summary, yes, a bit more fiddly now, but it is still possible to get most of the results returned as previously. In particular, I don't see any added problem with a basic search using the parents' (instead of child's) names.
** As an example of this, if a place was originally indexed as having taken place at "Alnwick", the autostandardization program has probably changed this (from the original place in Northumberland) to "Alnwick, Transvaal, South Africa" - that being the place at the top of the list of Alnwick locations in the database. So searching on "Alnwick, Northumberland" would not produce the "expected" search results.
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