OR operator in Search by Image Group Number (DGS) or Film Number

tyams

Is there a way to use the OR operator when searching by Image Group Number (DGS) or Film Number? For census or passenger arrival records, I often have information that would allow me to narrow the search of a collection to a handful of microfilm rolls based on location or date. Is there a way to utilize an OR operator when searching by film number so that 2-5 rolls can be searched simultaneously rather than needing to search an entire collection or search each roll individually? I've tried playing with the URL of the search results by adding "+", "|", "||", or "^" and an additional film number but they don't seem to be supported.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

If the films are consecutively numbered, then you can use the asterisk or question mark, but otherwise, you'll just need to do multiple searches.

tyams

I don't know why I hadn't thought of using a wildcard; that should work in most cases. It's been frustrating lately because the standardized locations tagged to records seem to be getting less accurate. I've encountered entire films which used to have been tagged to the correct locations (varied from one another) but have now have had a single location applied to the entire roll (which is often not a location even found on that roll, but just an arbitrarily assigned location that may be somewhere in the same state). Anyway, it makes searching by location less and less responsive, necessitating the use of film numbers as a location proxy.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I agree that location-based searching is nonfunctional on FamilySearch. Autostandardization has completely broken it, corrupting old indexes and rendering the event place field useless in new indexes. (They stop at the country, nowadays.)

When using film numbers (or their digital descendants) as a substitute for location, be aware that there is a process that's slowly rendering them less useful for the purpose: many index entries now have extra characters appended to the film number, and the matching algorithm for that field is beyond simplistic: NN doesn't match 00NN or NN_YY.

For example, I know that the death of Gizella Kronberger is on film 7251866, but searching for that name on that film gives "no results" -- because the film number on her index entry is "007251866_003_M99V-W8R". In order to find her entry, I have to pad the film number with asterisks: *7251866*.

(Sometimes, there's a film 10NN as well as a film 00NN, so padding the number like this gives a bunch of results from, say, Peru, along with the ones from, say, Hungary.)