Managing search results better by deleting records

LegacyUser

Dawn Onuffer said: I wish you had a feature to eliminate results in a search. Such as if I did a search for George Price and I know for a fact that some of the records that are listed do not belong to my George Price, I could click to delete them from my search. That way I could manage my search much better and not have to scroll through a bunch of unwanted results.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Dawn

There are different ways of reducing unwanted results. For example, if you are making a search from the Person page (via the FamilySearch logo link) you should make adjustments as soon as the search/results page appears. If you are looking for a birth, make sure you remove any detail that has been carried across relating to the person's marriage or death. Also, you can use the filter provision to search within specific groups of records, or even within one FamilySearch collection.

Doing this, and perhaps checking (ticking) the exact match fields, will easily reduce your results from the thousands initially offered to - on many occasions - just the handful of results you desire.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: I am in agreement with Paul's comments. Reduce the number of records by reducing the input or using the available filters such as searching only for marriage records or death records. You can also filter by collections if for example you want to only search one particular census year. These kinds of selections to reduce record would be much easier and more efficient that attempting to remove record by record any unwanted records.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: One way I have accomplished this in the past, as long as there are a reasonable number of results, it to export the results to a spreadsheet.

Set the view to 100 record results, then click the export button on the right just above the list of results.



Then open the downloaded file into a spreadsheet:



Spend a few minutes adjusting column widths, setting a frozen header that will stay in place when you sort and deleting empty or unneeded columns then you can sort by any column, delete rows that are you don't want, color code to highlight information.



You can do more than one page of 100, but then have to collect all the separate downloads into one page.

I've found this very helpful if I run across to families in which the parents have the same names and have to carefully sort out which children belong to which parents.

Note that the second column of the spreadsheet is an active link to the source on FamilySearch so you can instantly jump to it.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: Yes, this can be a very useful tool. I use it often.

After combining several sheets, it's quite easy to sort by any column to organize the data in any manner which works for whatever you may be looking for: name, location, parents, dates (Often requires a format change to sort, but often it can be done manually), etc.