Why does searching for records in Washington state instead search in Washington DC?
The overwhelming majority of results are Washington DC with a sizeable helping of Louisiana as well.
To be clear this is not a one time thing. I search for people and records in Washington state A LOT. This behavior is consistent and I've been dealing with it for a long time. The search returns make my work very difficult having to scroll through so many (sometimes hundreds) of Washington DC results to find just a few actual Washington state results buried below. And why is there always a bunch of Louisiana as well? I can see the Washington DC thing as possibly code that needs adjusting, but Louisiana?
Also, checking the exact box does nothing.
Answers
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Have you tried starting from the location research page?
Are you experiencing the problem if you start your research from that search page?
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I also search in WA a good bit and have encountered the same issue. Try this…
Go to:
Search Historical Records
Last Name: Farnsworth (this is a name used for example)
Place: Washington, United States (standard)
Search
Result: 5th hit is for Vera Farnsworth in Washington DC.
Result: 6th hit is for Edna Farnsworth Residence Place Seattle, King, WA. (Note that this place only shows up when the record is viewed - so Place includes any place in the person's record).
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Next Search
Last Name: Farnsworth
More Options
Country or Location: United States (standard)
State or Province: Washington (standard)
I went thru 5 pages of results - no Washington, DC found.
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What surname did you search for when you received Louisiana results?
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@Tiffany Farnsworth Nash Mod note: Your comment was edited to remove personal information for privacy reasons. Please see the Community Code of Conduct for more details.
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@Ashlee C. I just tested my suggestion of starting from the Location Research page, and I also saw District of Columbia records in the top results of a search in Washington State. I suspect this may be an artifact of that problem we've seen for many months of unrelated places showing up in a location search (New England in New York, North Dakota in North Carolina, for example). Could you bump it back up to the Engineers, please?
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To reiterate, This is not just one search, but almost always. However, since an example was asked for, here's one I did the other day.
Search Records / Surname Walters / Search
Residence: Washington State, Collection: 1880 US census / Search
487 results, over 50 Washington DC results must be scrolled past to get to a few Washington state results.
Again, checking the exact box does nothing.0 -
Yes, the exact button is known to have little effect.
This thread is the one I mentioned when I tagged the moderator, Ashlee, in my earlier comment. Many of the issues noted in that thread have been repaired, but some remain. I suspect what you have encountered may be a result of the ongoing issue.
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I tried searching with the parameters you listed but unfortunately I was unable to replicate your results.
Did you try the searches as I outlined? The second example was successful for me in weeding out Washington DC.
Note: When I go to the Search page now I am not given the option to enter Country/State. Perhaps they are working on it…
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Starting at Search - Records and clicking "more options", the bottommost fields are "Country or Location" and "State or Province". (The latter is grayed out until you enter something in the first field.) I entered "United States" in the first box, then "Washington" in the second, and put "Walters" in for the surname (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.recordCountry=United%20States&q.recordSubcountry=United%20States%2CWashington&q.surname=Walters). My browser's Find function turned up the first instance of "District of" on page 4, and a further 8 on the following 6 pages (i.e., 9 total out of 1000 — all of them GenealogyBank obituaries).
I also tested what happens with filters; the "birth" filter had a "DC rate" of 6 out of 500 (all of them census entries assigned by the post-processing to DC, but with just the ambiguous "Washington" in the birthplace field).
Those are relatively low failure rates, but they should be zero. I don't know what aspect of the damage done by autostandardization is responsible for these localization errors.
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My search seems simple to me and should be easy to replicate.
I want to see all with surname Walters residing in Washington state in the 1880 census.
Looking at the search page
Last names: Walters
Residence Place: Washington state (standard)
Collection: 1880 US census
Am I doing it wrong or is what is suggested a workaround?0 -
They're attempts at workarounds.
I tried both ways starting from the 1880 U.S. Census collection page, and both came up with 54 matches. (No, I didn't check whether it's the same 54 matches.)
Surname = Walters, Country or Location = United States, State or Province = Washington: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.recordCountry=United%20States&q.recordSubcountry=United%20States%2CWashington&q.surname=Walters&f.collectionId=1417683
Surname = Walters (69,000-odd results), Residence bubble, Residence Place = United States, Washington: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.surname=Walters&c.collectionId=on&f.collectionId=1417683&c.residencePlace1=on&f.residencePlace0=10&c.residencePlace2=on&f.residencePlace1=10%2CWashington
There do not appear to be any DC entries in either set of 54.
I think it's probably the same 54 results either way, which seems odd at first glance — the first one didn't even mention anything about residence — but not when you consider that it's a census: the event place is a residence. You can't be enumerated in Place A while residing in Place B. (Well, OK, you can, but only because people do things wrong.) The results would be different if you were looking for, say, people named Walters who were born in Washington state. I think in that case you'd have to use the birthplace input field and then the birthplace filter; using the Country or Location fields would narrow the results to people with a birthplace field that matches "Washington" (wherever in the world the system happens to think that is) who were enumerated in Washington state. It would not find someone who'd moved to Idaho.
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How curious. I just ran your search:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.recordCountry=United%20States&q.recordSubcountry=United%20States%2CWashington&q.surname=WaltersI searched and searched but could not find any "district of" using my browser's search. I also added a Collection Filter for GenealogyBank Obits but still could not find any "district of".
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@Tiffany Farnsworth Nash, as I said, the first one is on page 4 (with 100 per page).
This is Firefox and Win10, but that shouldn't make any difference.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi
Exactly. I understood exactly what you posted. I used the link that you sent. The results I got, even page 4, did not have Washington, DC. I am a Mac Monterey 12.7.6 using Safari 17.6. I didn't think that would make a difference either but we are definitely getting different results from the same search.
I'll run it again to confirm…
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I just reran (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.recordCountry=United%20States&q.recordSubcountry=United%20States%2CWashington&q.surname=Walters)
Results = 109,389
Page 4 (starts with United States Census, 1910 for James Walters)
"district of" not found.
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Truly weird. I also get 109,389 results, but the top of page 4 is Anne Emelia Walters in an obituary.
Just to make sure, here are the URLs of my search and yours:
They sure look identical to me.
(I just noticed: the URL scheme labels it "surname", not "last name" like the input field still does. Does this mean that there's hope that they'll eventually get rid of "last name" and "first name" entirely? [It's especially fun if you set the name language to Hungarian, but that doesn't apply to searches.])
The only other thing I can think to try is for someone else to do this "from scratch". It's not a complicated search, with just three input fields: surname = Walters, Country or Location = United States, State or Province = Washington.
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I didn't know you could share a link to a search. If this works you can see mine.
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Since Julia runs Firefox (as I do normally), I switched to Chrome to run the same search.
I also get 109,389 results on a search for Walters (not exact) in Washington, United States. Page 4 (100 per page) has a GenealogyBank obituary for the first mention of District of Columbia.
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This is very strange indeed. Yes, they are the exact same searches. I have rerun several times with the same results. My results definitely differ from yours.
Now that Áine Ní Donnghaile duplicated your results, I wonder if there is anyone out there with a Mac that can duplicate mine?
Success. I was able to follow the link you provided and recreate your results. What I am seeing is that you are using the 'Residence Place' in your search. Try going to the bottom of the search fields under 'Add Record Options'; click Location; enter country: United States and State: Washington. See if that works better for you. According to Julia your results will still contain Washington, DC but it should be an improvement.
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Yes, the workaround is an improvement. I can work with this, thanks. Does this mean the problem won't be fixed?
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@Michael J. Allen While your search is not wrong, it requires more computing power resulting in probable slower (and possibly incorrect) results.
The way your search is formatted, the mechanism has to look through ALL records to find those with the Walters (and variants) surname and then display those with "Washington" in the residence field.By first narrowing the search to the United States and then the state of Washington, the search is less cumbersome and can display what you want much more quickly.
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It had occured to me that it was inefficient to interact with the system that way.
I'll be sure and let others know about this way of doing things.
Thanks for the help.0
