Comments on: Ancestry.com Search: New way to add Family Members to your search

By: Andy Hatchett

Andy Hatchett — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:40:20 +0000

Why not just add occupation, military or any other event as a custom event in the person’s time line and attach the appropriate record as a source as you would any other event?

Then it is all on screen and you click on the source to view it just like you do birth, marriage, or death.

By: Al Eagan

Al Eagan — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:29:43 +0000

I haven’t tried the new search feature yet but I don’t think it could be anything but an improvement. It would be nice if ancesty had a place to record an ancestor’s principle trade/occupation and a military service along with birth/death, marriages, residences in the life events section. I know ancestry has a military history section, and trade/occupation is found in the original census records. I have attached as many official records as I can find to the life event section in my tree, but,, in order to view something you have to open a differnt web page, like a census record that was saved to the tree.

By: J. Fulmer

J. Fulmer — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:55:19 +0000

No doubt about it … Old Search is still best. Old Search is more intuitive and provides the better starting point …i.e. the suspected living location. By contrast, New Search expects you to start with a birth date which most times one does not know. To me this is the root problem with New Search.
John

By: BEE

BEE — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:04:59 +0000

Ok, Andy, I put you to the top of my “most viewed” in my ancestry bookmarks, but in my humble opinion, my “senior” mind finds “new search” far too complicated and cluttered.
As James #56 said, it’s more “search” then “find”.

By: An UnOfficial Guide To Ancestry Member Trees

An UnOfficial Guide To Ancestry Member Trees — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:29:55 +0000

New Search does take a bit of getting used to but, imho, is well worth the time spent getting used to it.

By: James

James — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:50:27 +0000

I’m not that happy with these “improvements.” In fact it seems to make the use of searches more difficult. When searching now your display no longer mark the records you have already attached to an ancestor. You no longer see the tree information on children, spouses, and parents and are just show limited fact on the individual your searching for. Your search engine doesn’t seem to really use the data connected with an ancestor to look for more records and will show you census records of individuals alive well after your ancestor is dead and buried. If searching for Hervey Peter Lane born in 1833, for example, your search engine will bring up every Peter Lane before it will show you Hervey, Harvey, or Henry. If you change the search in the bottom fields to H. P. Lane, Hervey P. Lane, or any other possible listing he might be mistakenly filed under, all information as to how you were searching for disappears as if your searching for a new person. Now If you find something under this method, you must attach it via “attach to someone in my tree” and have to hunt that person down. All in all, it seems that these improvements are more designed to keep people searching your records then to help them find records through a search.

By: BEE

BEE — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:22:53 +0000

Hi Andy, while I can’t duplicate it now, because I have the 1910, 1920 and 1930 census for this family, I’m pretty sure it brought up – Pittsburgh Ward 4 Allegheny, Pennsylvania, or at least Pittsburgh, Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the residence box on “new search” after adding the name from my tree.
Now I have to figure out if the “wife” with a different name on the 1920 census is the same “wife” on the 1910, and widowed on the 1930!
btw, I’ve had no problem returning to “old search” after going to “new search”.
Sorry, I just find “new search” tiresome!

By: P J Evans

P J Evans — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:46:11 +0000

Old/new search: the site will, at random, use the new search, even though you have been using the old one. (And I also prefer the old search.)

Is there any possibility of getting the newspaper/journal search set up to search by *location*? It’s a pain in the fundament to scroll through sixteen zillion screens to get to the one newspaper buried in the list that you know the article is in. And if there are two or three newspapers in one location, they won’t come up together when you have to go by newspaper name. (See, for example, Independence, Kansas, which at one time had *three* newspapers, even though they weren’t all daily. Or, more recently, two newspapers in many major cities.)

By: Andy Hatchett

Andy Hatchett — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:08:19 +0000

Bee Re: #50

If you are using New Search and are entering locations then you almost have to use locations from the drop down Menu – in your case “Pittsburgh, Alleghney, Pennsylvania, USA”

Inputting terms such as “Pgh, PA” or “Pittsburgh, PA” will give unreliable results.

By: Lulu

Lulu — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:41:42 +0000

I am amazed that anyone would actually use the new search in preference to the old search. The results on the old search are much easier to scan through. Why Ancestry have spent time and money creating the new search and then ‘enhancing’ it is beyond me.

Has anyone at Ancestry ever used the new search in anger…? It might be all right in testing, but not when you need to do creative searching to find someone who’s not ennumerated/indexed as expected, such as in Bee’s comment (#50) above.

It’s definitely a retrograde step. Please please please, Ancestry – stop all this nonsense and take time to review your search offerings properly.