search by year of birth as well as place.

LegacyUser

Lee Frances Merritt said: also search by year of birth!! This should be added to the search criteria as it is very annoying to be looking for someone in 1890 and be given dates ranging from 1600's on. Not helpful at all.

LegacyUser

Stewart Millar said: Covered a few days ago in a similar enquiry . . . .
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

LegacyUser

Paul said: At present, the developers seem to prefer moving in the opposite direction to what you are suggesting. Instead of having check boxes against the separate events you will find, intermittently at present, just one "Exact Searching" check box on the page.

The response I received in another thread was, basically, this is being trialled because making exact searching an "easy" option means many relevant records could be missed (e.g. if the event being searched was at a place that had been spelled incorrectly - either in the source or by user input).

Specifically regarding dates, please read the comments on the thread for which Stewart provides a link. My personal preference would be (like yours) to be able to search on a date / date range and only have those results returned - instead of them just being prioritised. My worry is that the developers will choose to scrap the "exact search" feature altogether (i.e. for places, too) at some point.

As I have commented elsewhere, I find the present search facility (disregarding the date factor!) to be far better than, say, at Find My Past and (even more so) Ancestry. I have found any "exact" searches on other websites merely prioritise what is requested and sometimes do not even do that properly - leading you to have to scroll through several pages of results in case you might miss something relevant to your search.

I sincerely hope FamilySearch will not choose to follow the same practice as these large, commercial websites, as it will definitely make my searches much more difficult and time-consuming.

LegacyUser

Lee Frances Merritt said: I would like very much to have the option to put in a date range - say up to 10 years and eliminate all the extraneous years that we get that have NOTHING to do with what we are searching for.

LegacyUser

Stewart Millar said: I would still propose that my earlier answer is a good enough workaround to this question . . . to repeat myself . . .

Stewart Millar 9 days ago
I have found the best workaround for not having an exact date search - is to put the date (year) range required - even just for one year, say 1843 to 1843 . . . as always with a search, carefully minimise the other data matches you need to use . . . the results will be ordered with the records that match the date range at the top of the results . . . . followed by thousands of other reuslts that match your other criteria irrespective of the year range.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: See your other discussion entry and the example provided by Paul. It clearly shows a date range entry. You would enter 1900 in the first field and 1910 in the second to cover the first decade of the 1900s (plus one year).