Andy,

>An easy way to prevent duplicates is to *not* merge other trees into yours.

Sometimes it just happens. I would like that ability to eliminate doubles when it happens. Or to merge people without having to jump through a million hoops. Now that would be an improvement instead of some of the sophomoric eye candy that seems to be forced on us.

My mother has sort of a lost branch of the family, where one of her uncles moved from Tennessee to California way back when. I have oral histories of the names of the uncle’s children, but that’s about it (the uncle’s children being my mother’s first cousins). One of the cousins is named Louisa Bray, born about 1927, and my mother remembers that Louisa married a man named Bray who was Louisa’s cousin.

Well, the search process does not do a very good job looking for spouses when they both have the same last name. Old Search does ok when you are in a specific database such as Tennessee marriages, California marriages, Nevada marriages, etc. But Old Search does a poor job of finding spouses with the same last name from the Advanced Search screen of the main home page or main search page. New Search does a poor job of finding spouses with the same last name in all cases.

The problems are two-fold. One problem is that New Search does not distinguish properly between the first name and the last name of the second spouse, essentially treating the names like keywords. And in the case of generic searches, even Old Search has the same flawed design. The search mixes last names between spouses. A search for Jane Smith and her husband Mr. Doe will find Jane Doe who married Samuel Anderson. But just think about how many extra and incorrect hits you get if you look for Jane Doe who married Mr. Doe (or in my case, Louisa Bray who married Mr. Bray).

Where are you. Your last response was the day after this article was started – that was October 11th – not November – October, nearly 5 weeks ago.

These last posts from Jerry Bryan and Jade #s 28,29 and 30, with mine at #24 and #25 need answers, is something broken?

And it doesn’t matter how much lipstick you put on a pig – it’s still a pig.

TonyC

Oh, and results are including same County name, wrong State among the top choices. This is stupid and annoying, allied with the same silliness in the new-style links in the Message Boards. The better results presentation would be Same State, Different County.

For example, get a list of matches and repeat the search with more specific criteria that will narrow the search. You can tell from the first search that the more specific criteria will get at least a few matches, but it finds none. Repeat the more specific search immediately, and it produces the expected result.

I even had the following strangeness. A search gave 5 pages of matches. I was paging through the matches with the Next Page option. When I hit the 4th page, it said there were no matches. I backed up and clicked Next Page again, and the 4th page of matches appeared correctly.

It appears that some otherwise unannounced maintenance is going on, and that the maintenance is causing very strange and unrepeatable search results.