House numbers

KatherinePendzuk

Is there a way to search by house number? For example Anna Aredarczyk in the Poland, Tarnow Roman Catholic Diocese Church Books, 1612-1900 collection was living at house number 175 in 1883.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XPB8-NN5

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This is the first time I've ever seen house numbers included in an index, and no, I don't believe FS has a means of searching by them. (I checked: that field is not included in the spreadsheet if you download a page of search results.)

I don't know how it worked in Poland, but in Hungary, houses got re-numbered unpredictably, so house numbers are not always as useful as one would hope.

PeterWerner3

If it's miscellaneous information like that, there would need to be some kind of field for general keywords, which I can't find in the Familysearch "Search Historical Records" page, even when "More Options" is highlighted. I will note that I've had some success with this at Ancestry.com, where I'm also a member, which has a Keyword search box among its search options. This only works in the few databases where street address info has been digitized, typically address books, directories, and censuses. Where address info is found there, I've found that it's highly subject to mistranscription. The use of wildcard searches (for example, "Leus* 19" to find variations on "Leusbergstraße 19") and being careful to restrict the search to a single town is a search strategy I've had some success with.

KatherinePendzuk

I agree Peter. I think the 1920 census at ancestry is an example where you can search for a lot of things besides name and location. Maybe house numbers are something ancestry should include in searches. I like both sites for their different features. Like you said, you can use wild cards here, while at ancestry it's exact vs vague.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

When you're searching in City Directories, on Ancestry or elsewhere, you'll want to remember that those are indexed by OCR, not by humans. And older directories, with poor copies, broken typefaces, etc, are very prone to OCR error. Especially words/numbers including 1, l, i, j, etc. will be problematic for OCR indexing.