Ancestry.co.uk has been messing with me today.
Firstly, I found my grandmother's baptism by manually browsing the London parish and year I had been told she was baptised in. Hurray!
However she doesn't come up easily on a search as her forename has been mispelled - given the underlying record I'll give Ancestry the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Secondly, I discovered she had an older sister - a surprise, and hurray! I did this by searching for her parents names in conjunction with the parish name that my grandmother was baptised in.
However, her parents names are George and Alice Martha. I wanted to see if they perhaps had other children I didn't know about baptised elsewhere, so I removed the parish name, and included mother Alice's middle name with the "Exact" box ticked. Hey presto, it doesn't find ANY entries, even the two I know are in there! I know for a fact that Alice's middle name is included on the transcription because I can see it on the two entries I found earlier. So, Ancestry, why does your search engine do this?
The surname is a very common one, so if I remove the Exact tickbox on the forename it finds 27,395 possible entries and doesn't show the George and Alice Martha ones first. *Sigh*
Sunday, April 04, 2010
A love-hate relationship
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1 comments:
I can feel your pain! Oddly enough, I can find LOTS on my great-great-great-grandfather, but nearly nothing on my great-grandfather! A family member is writing a book and gratefully, has asked me to help write about him. It is so frustrating! Especially to have known him so well, I know he's real! He just doesn't hardly exist in the cyber world! Uhg! good luck to you!!!!!
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