1920 census search for state of birth

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: Please fix the search of the 1920 census where you ask for a state and it gives you the wrong one. I asked for only birth in west virginia, and instead it gives me Ohio....

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community support forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

A lot depends upon how you set up your search. If you designate "Location", that will not limit the birth to that location. If memory serves me, even if you designate the birth location and check the exact box, that will only apply to the date. The location is essentially ignored (unless something has been changed during the past several months).

I don't think anyone is going to argue about the way the search (historical records) currently works with respect to limit the search to a specific place. It needs some additional tweaking and the way the search parameters are set, places are often ignored.

Yes, I know it is frustrating when it comes to searching for census records for a specific state. Sometimes my only option is to perform a search from another site that also has the U.S. Census records. Ancestry offers some U.S. Census searches for free -- I do not know if the 1920 census is among the free searches.

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: Thanks for your reply. This is a quirk that used to work properly and now does not. I guess I will see if I can find another site that has the 1920 census records and see how I can filter through that. How often are the search filtering programs updated?

LegacyUser

Brian Jensen said: Hi Lynn,
Thanks for your post and questions. Can you share the Search URL that shows your 1920 Census query? We would like to review the results you are seeing. And we are always looking for changes / improvements to our search system.
Thanks,

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: Please note that I clicked on west virginia as the birth place, once. Never did click on ohio county. I am looking for all people with name ma* Hayes born in west virginia.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/r...

LegacyUser

Juli said: It looks like the indexed entries from the state of Ohio have had the wrong standardized place associated with them: they've been identified with Ohio county in West Virginia (https://www.familysearch.org/research...). In other words, the fault is in the index metadata, not in Records Search.

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: So who do I contact? or is that something you would do?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: There are a number of instances of what I call "gross indexing errors" where the situation exists for a large number of indexed entries. I first ran into this with a ship's name several years ago.

As far as I know, it is something that appears to be addressed by FamilySearch personnel. If you do not see an improvement in the search, I would open a case with support (selecting "problem" in the feedback window), providing the specific case details. Once opened, you can visit your cases, select that particular case and add screen shots, etc., to illustrate the problem.

Hopefully, Brian will pass this particular issue up the line for correction and you won't have to open a separate case.

LegacyUser

Brian Jensen said: I've created a ticket for the engineers to investigate this issue.

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: Thank you!

LegacyUser

Brian Rhees said: Lynn,
Thanks for submitting this issue for us to look at.
It looks like Juli is correct. Some records that have a birth place of "Ohio" have been indexed to return both for searches of "Ohio, United States" as well as "Ohio, West Virginia, United States".
The source of this bad index has been identified and we're working to resolve it now (the fix is complete, unfortunately applying that fix to all the records takes some time).

Thanks again for bringing it to our attention!
Brian

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: It has been over a month and this is still not resolved. Can you give us an estimate of when you will have completed this?

LegacyUser

Brian Rhees said: We're actively working towards the next full data refresh and hope to have it done within a month. If we hit delays I would still expect it to be completed within two months from now.

LegacyUser

Lynn Bowdoin said: ok. well i am dissapointed.