Search - Records is lying to me
I'm searching for a death record. When I put in the various details and a wildcard in her surname, I get nine results (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.birthLikeDate.from=1877&q.birthLikeDate.to=1879&q.fatherGivenName=Janos&q.givenName=Maria&q.motherGivenName=Zsuzsanna&q.spouseGivenName=Janos&q.spouseSurname=Szlovak&q.surname=Trn%2A&f.collectionId=1452460).
However, the surname in question begins with a collision of consonants and consists entirely of "most often misread" letters: Trnyik. Therefore, I cannot trust that it wasn't entirely mistranscribed as, say, Fimgeh or something. So I tried removing the surname, expecting to need to do some serious filtering.
That's a falsehood, pure and simple.
Why is Search lying to me like this, and can it please be convinced not to?
Answers
-
The "No Results" report is not a falsehood -- it's the 100% truth about what was found. The search algorithm found no results. But it certainly seems odd that removing a search parameter reduces the results, when it sure seems like it should increase the number of results. What seems particularly unhelpful is the suggestion on the No Results page: "Sometimes in life, less is more. Try your search again with a little less information. If you get too many results, you can always add more later." In this case, you just tried to follow that very suggestion, and the result was that less was less.
In this particular case I think you can get the results you are seeking by entering a simple "*" wildcard in the last names field. I'm a bit confused as to why that would yield different results (doesn't the algorithm already assume that any search parameter not supplied could match anything?) but it does seem to work:
2 -
That unhelpful suggestion has caused me to shake my fist at the monitor more than once. I've been working lately on a surname of only 3 letters. Most often, the 3rd letter has been mistranscribed. Sometimes, the 1st letter has been misunderstood. Occasionally, all 3 are wrong.
I've resorted to searching for the member of the family with the least common (and most likely transcribed correctly) and no surname at all.
0 -
@Alan E. Brown, thank you for the asterisk-only suggestion. That's very, very strange: I, too, assumed that blank and * would be exactly the same.
I stand by my statement that "No Results" is a falsehood: there were, at barest minimum, nine results, the ones that matched my first search.
2
