Search - Records can't find a particular index entry
There are two deaths indexed from image 7 of film 4855621, and they're both correctly there on the Image Index tab, so if you start with the image, you can bring up the individual index entry pages with no trouble.
Rutkai Anna: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6V1G-8VKG
Pozczolka Antonia: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6V1G-NPL3
However, in the other direction, there's no way to get to poor little Anna Rutkai's death record. No matter what search details I try, if I tell Search - Records to look on this film, it cannot find Anna Rutkai. For example, if I tell it to look for Anna with any surname starting with R, it comes up with a single entry for a mother named Anna Rózenberg (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.filmNumber=4855621&q.givenName=Anna&q.surname=R%2A). Yes, I've even tried it with the names reversed (given name Rutkai or surname Anna), and yes, I've tried it with just her parents. It can't find them, either.
The other entry on the image comes up without any trouble (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.filmNumber=4855621&q.givenName=Ant%2A&q.surname=Poz%2A).
Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?
Answers
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Clicking on the record for Rutkai, Anna , I then clicked on the link for the Digital Folder Number
004855621 which as far as I am aware should give you the records for this microfilm. I then filtered death by year 1899 to give a smaller database.
Going back to the record for Rutkai, Anna I then advanced to the next page consisting of two records for Taubek Anna and Karafiáth Anna
Although I could see a record for Karafiáth Anna in "my" subset of records, I could not see a record for Taubek Anna .
On this extremely small sample perhaps the first/top record on each digital page is being transferred to a different database, or is perhaps being "lost" due to some coding error?
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We appreciate you bringing this problem to our attention. The issue has been submitted for investigation. We will get back to you as soon as we have an answer. Thank you so much for your kindness and patience while this is being addressed.
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I believe what you were seeing is part of the process of splitting the films into item numbers. The doc info for Rutkai Anna is 004855621_001_M9DJ-J7S. The 004855621 is the DGS and 001 is the item on that film. The image number is also listed (7).
Looking for Anna R* in Search>Records (as of 25 Sep 23, 6pm) provides the following:
- DGS 4855621 = 0 results
- DGS 4855621* = 10 results
- DGS 004855621_001_M9DJ-J7S = 2 results
I think I will try to get in the habit of adding an asterisk to the film number when searching by a specific DGS.
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@Maile L, huh. That's what's going on now, but it doesn't explain what was happening back in February: why was Antonia turning up in the search without any problem, while Anna wasn't?
(Unfortunately, I didn't take screenshots of the document information back then. Should've.)
And if they're going to start mucking up the Digital Folder Number with extra gibberish, they need to tweak the search algorithm to be less literal-minded about the film number: 4855621 should automatically be a match to 4855621_001 etc., without our needing to pad things with asterisks.
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Hi, @Julia Szent-Györgyi ,
I'll echo @Maile L 's thanks for bringing this to our attention---once our team was able to look into it, we did find an issue with the way these records were processed for searching. While the issue with Anna and Antonia seems to have been resolved by that point (we sometimes wish too that we had snapshots of the systems when errors like these occur so we can prevent them again), we found many other records in this and other collections with the same problem and are continuing to work with other teams to resolve it elsewhere. We probably never would've realized otherwise; so thank you again.
As far as your question about what was happening when you first noticed the issue, I believe (at least from the description and what I saw with other records) that we had stored Antonia under the abbreviated Digital Folder Number ("004855621") and Anna under the full version ("004855621_001_M9DJ-J7S"). This was especially problematic because it meant that if someone had clicked on the link to search by Digital Folder Number on the record detail page for Antonia (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6V1G-NPL3 -> see the link to the left under Document Information), she wouldn't appear in the results, even though they got there from her record page.
As for the additional item number, my initial thought too was that it was extra information. To better understand the usefulness of it though, I consulted another researcher who like you uses the Digital Folder Number (it's definitely one of the more advanced ones that most people don't use or probably realize is even there). From his explanation, the most common use for Digital Folder Number is that a researcher will find a person they're interested in (either by searching or looking at images of the films) and then use the full number associated with the record to look for relatives that may appear in the same source (frequently by clicking on the link I mentioned above). Typically, a researcher wouldn't want to search across the various item numbers even on the same film number because they would represent vastly different records (one might be births, another deaths, etc.) and are more an artifact of trying to use all the space on a single film reel.
In this case, the different item numbers are more closely related, just representing different years, so it makes sense that you may want to search on all the item numbers at once. Hopefully, adding the asterisk in isn't too troublesome, though we do recognize it is an additional step for you. We try to be consistent between the different fields and with common search methods so that users don't need to remember special rules for each field (e.g. the asterisk having the same functionality when you used it to search for surname "R*" as when you add it for the film number).
Please let us know if that doesn't describe how you're using this field as we're always looking to improve the system and better understand how we can best help people find their family.
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@kaden18, thank you very much for chiming in/explaining a bit!
Due to the autostandardization mess, and the probably-related removal/absence of location information from many index entries (for example: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6N99-BGDM or https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6VBM-CJNF), searching by place, or filtering a search by place, simply Does Not Work on FamilySearch any more. You cannot trust the location information to be present in the index, and even if it is present, you cannot trust it to be correct. I search by film numbers or their digital descendants as a workaround for this problem: I search the (unfortunately now rather noticeably stale) Catalog for the place, find the type of records I need, and use the film numbers listed on the catalog page to narrow my search to that place and record type.
There are now two obstacles to my workaround: the stale catalog, and the added gibberish in the film number field. The first means that the absence in the catalog of the magnifying glass icon is meaningless; the film may have been indexed in the past two years or so. The second means that sometimes the magnifying glass doesn't work any more, or brings up only a miniscule fraction of the records that are actually associated with the film.
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