More search questions from the webinar
There were some questions in the webinar that were search related that I didn’t have time to answer. This is the second set of questions. You can also view the first set
7. How can I obtain results for just one state?
This is a good question and there are multiple ways to go about it. I’ll show you a couple.
I’m going to pick Maryland as the state.
Method 1: State and Country Pages
If you go to the Maryland State Page. Over on the left you will find a box that looks like:
Type in a given name and a surname, and press Search. The results here will match any result where a location is Maryland. It could be a residence, a birth location, death location, or marriage location.
Method 2: Exact “Lived In (Residence)
This one is available in the new search interface. Let’s say you are doing a search for John Smith. Under Lived In (Residence) type in Maryland, USA and choose exact. (You’ll need to be in advanced options.):
This will limit your results to only records that show a John Smith with a residence of somewhere in Maryland. You can try the same for Birth or Marriage or any other location. I would recommend you not do all of these locations at once as exact, because it will only return results that exactly match those values. It is hard to find a record that shows a birth, marriage, death and residence all on the same document. So try them one at a time.
8. Is there a way to refine the search results so they are organized by date or location or some other category?
There are ways to limit the results to specific locations or specific dates, but not to organize them. See question 7 above, or question 6 in the previous post on tips on how to do this.
9. If looking for a birth is it best to put a last name in keyword?
I’ve never done this before, but I’m a big believer of trying everything you can think of. If you put a name or word into a keyword field it should try and match it anywhere in the data of the record. So if the surname is in some random unexpected data field, this could help locate it.
10. Can you search for records from the UK?
If you are on the ancestry.co.uk site, there is a check box on their homepage that allows you to do that. You must be subscribed to the UK subscription.
If you are on the ancestry.com site, you can use the tips in question 7 to search for records that have the location UK in them. Or you can use the Collection Priority feature in the new search interface to prioritize UK records. On the you will see:
Choose United Kingdom Collections and records that have been identified as being from the UK will be prioritized higher in a ranked search. You can reset this in the refine box as well:
I’ll continue to collect questions on how to do things and try and post answers on the blog from time to time.
Happy Searching.
Anne
What happened to your other posting, it seems to have disappeared into thin air just like all the excuses that weren’t made about the appalling lack of service this past weekend.
Was it a conscious decision to remove all the valid complaints from view? The link at the bottom of the previous posting (State and Country Pages) does not take you to “Questions from the search seminar” but to your postings page. I also can’t find the posting under the posting archive for January.
If this posting has been mistakenly mislaid please let me know as I have all 140+ postings on file and would really like to assist Ancestry in this matter.
Unless of course the posting was deliberately deleted because of the totally negative comments that you don’t want the subscribers to see.
By the way, why was the site unavailable for so long worldwide?
I also have a copy of this posting – if it too disappears believe me it will be posted again – and again – until we get the answer we deserve as paying customers.
If I’m completely incorrect then please by all means reply to this with the link.
TonyC