Regional searches of Records, Please!

LegacyUser

Dawn Knight said: Please allow us to search records using a region of the country--or surrounding states--something that allows for people who often cross borders

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Thank you for the feedback.

We have talked about implementing something like this, or a GPS location search functionality. Unfortunately it is still a ways down on the priority list.

For now, you might be best doing multiple collection searches to cover the places you are interested in.

Thank you!

LegacyUser

Paul said: Whilst I have often criticised the Search functionality of Find My Past - and have been worried FamilySearch developers might be leaning towards it - it does have one very good feature. This is the ability to input a place name and make a search within +/- 5, 10 miles, etc. This allows me to input a location (say in England) near a county border and get results relating to parishes in two (sometimes three) counties within the specified range. However, I believe there would have to be radical changes in order for something similar to be adopted by FamilySearch.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I'm not so sure about the "radical" changes, Paul.

The way the standards for places are set up, they are by coordinates, not place names. As such, it should be able to set up a locality range within xxx of the coordinates, and convert those within that range to their text equivalent.

I'm wondering if that is or is not being done now when an exact is checked for a place.

The biggest problem continues to be the naming used in indexing. Some of it is atrocious and until that can be corrected, such a search may miss some important collections because of the way things were set up.

Some U.S. federal census enumerations are particularly bad wherein a "place" is not one, but several places... It has improved somewhat over the years and most of the problems may have already been addressed (it has been a while since I've worked with the enumerations).

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: You are close Tom.

The search system was created before the place standards returned locations. The place locations are not currently used in the search system.

The data is now available from standards but it is not being used by the search system.

LegacyUser

Adrian Clift said: Not a fan of Ancestery in general, but they offer search within a county OR county and contiguous counties. Have found that feature very useful. (For whatever it's worth. . . )