New Android App Search Bugs
In the past, when you search for records for someone in the android app, their birth year was automatically populated in the search with a 2-year range on either side (someone born in 1884 would have a search range of 1882 to 1886). The new version of the app is only populating the search with just the actual birth year (1884 to 1884). This will cut out of the search a lot of records that get birth years off by 1-2 years (many records, like censuses). To get these correct results, users have to expand the range of years that FamilySearch is automatically populating into the search.
Changing the search terms myself to have a broader date range is fine and I've been doing that this morning to find census records for a woman in California. Her birth was in October 1884, so almost all of her census records state that she was born in 1885 or 1886. But the additional bug which makes the previous bug almost unbearable is that if I open a record in the search results to see if it matches her (whether I attach the record to her or just look at it), once I go back from the record details to the list of search results, the search terms and results revert back to the automatically populated data.
If I changed the automatically populated search data from her maiden name to her married name, from a single year birth range to a 4-year birth range, from only including her birth location to including a residence location that's in a state that wasn't her birth location, from the automatic setting only searching with her birth info to searching with what I know about her death... All of this information reverts back to the default search items/info if I click on one record. This makes searching for records on the app seem very unappealing. I will probably need to search for records almost exclusively on my desktop computer if the search functions can't be restored to how they used to be.
I've also noticed that the search now refuses to find records in a residence location that doesn't match the birth location. Searching for documents has become much more difficult in this new update of the android app.
Answers
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Please provide the married and maiden name of your deceased ancestor that you were searching for. This is necessary to duplicate the same results you received so that it can be forwarded to the engineers to review the issues you experienced. Thank you.
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@LTG50 , the automatically populated single year birth range in a search is still a problem (applicable to any profile on FamilySearch).
The reverting of search terms after you click on a record detail page seems to have been fixed now. I just tried it with L13F-DW9 Mary Alice Owen (Smith), and the search terms that I changed in the search (4-year birth range, married name, possible location and range of years of her death) didn't revert back to the automatically populated data. Yay!
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Thank you for your detailed report regarding searching for records in the Android Family Tree app, version 5.0.0. The problem with date ranges when searching records will be fixed in the next version; 5.0.1
should be available early next weekis available now (as of 19 Dec 2024).The other issues are not in the app specifically, since searching for records in the app uses the FamilySearch.org website for those purposes. I'm glad to hear that the problem you had with search parameters being reset seems to have gone away.
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