Why have you changed the filters for British Isles records, and removed counties altogether?

LegacyUser

Audrey Collins said: Why have you used different search filters from the old FamilySearch? The ones you have chosen for the British Isles are bizarre. The category 'United Kingdom' is an appropriate description for some record sets, but the UK includes Scotland and all or part of Ireland, which are listed separately. The old FamilySearch filter of British Isles, which could in turn be filtered to individual countries was more accurate, and also a more efficient way to search. It also has the advantage of including the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are not part of the UK, (they are dependencies under the Crown) but whose records need to be grouped with it, and not listed separately with all the European countries where they could easily be overlooked. I am also very disappointed that there is no longer a facility to filter by county; searching for common names produces an unmanageable number of results.

LegacyUser

Jean Robbins said: Thank you for your feedback Audrey, we have passed it on to the engineers who works that works on filtering.

LegacyUser

bands11x said: Our patrons at the London Family History Centre almost exclusively search records by county and then parish. Losing the county designation as an identifier, short circuits the normal search process. Please identify the databases with a County identifier. It is important to be able to limit searches to specific geographical areas. For a great guide to this technique, check out FreeBMD's geographical search filters! They have county filters or you can alternatively specify a Registration District filter. To complete their robust search ability, you can specify mulitple counties or multiple districts to search.

LegacyUser

Fiona Hall said: Most definately !

People moved across 'country' boundaries and we need to be able to search across the whole of the UK & Ireland in one go if we need to - splitting off Scotland's records from the UK's records is not helping at all

The old IGI search was so much better

LegacyUser

Rachel Gwillim said: Very clear statement of the problem, Audrey! I would only add that searching by parish is also needed for common names like Ball, Cook, Green. I expected this to be an improvement added in NewFS! I should have known better as the FamilySearch CDs did allow searching across multiple counties and searching for children by date and county and both these facilities were lost when the original FS website was launched. I have several family branches around county borders (4 counties for one branch) and I forever checking back in case I forgot one of them on a search!

LegacyUser

Marie Byatt said: This is needed for every country that has interior geographic units - England/ counties - Canada/provinces = Switzerland/cantons - USA/ States etc. Also the old drop down boxes that allowed you to choose from a list by country, state, etc were very useful and seemed to keep the search in the area you were interested in. I find the new search, even when given a specified locale - wanders. I put in to search for Michigan, USA (exact) and get results from Gloucestershire in the UK - not good

Carole Baxter

Having begun with the old IGI in the 1980s then with online FS I have appreciated its uses for decades but the new format takes far too long to use by not being able to specify towns or counties with a simple tick.

E.g., I was searching for a name in Gloucestershire and after 4 for that county on page 1 others appeared from elsewhere then just one from G on page 2, none on page 3 but a few on page 4. Not worth looking.

Finding the record number to look for relatives is far more difficult in this new format