[or-roots] Ancestry.com - Response to Pat

[cklooster at aol.com]

Okay Pat in Tuscon...here's a quick example.  If I do a search for my maternal grandfather, David M. Christie born 1898 in Ontario, Canada, and stipulate that priority be given to US collections and that all terms be matched exactly; I get eight responses.  The first two are actually accurate; an entry on the One World Tree, and a US Naturalization Record.  The last six are for unrelated individuals ranging from David Horace Christie to Paschal A.M. Christie.  What kind of "exact match" is that?  If I uncheck the "match all terms exactly" box and repeat the search, I get 431,864 (not a bazillion, but you get the picture) responses, but of the first twenty on the page, only the first two (same two as the first search) are the right person.  Now before anyone on the list decides to help me out, please understand that I'm just giving this as an example...I already know everything I need to know about my grandfather.    My point is that there are a number of other records on Ancestry.com that reference this man...several border crossing references as well as US census records.  Since I know where he was living in any given year, it is relatively simple to give much more detailed information to pull up the records I needed.  But had I not known what state or county he was living in, or if I did not know his birthplace or birthdate, sorting through all of the "hits" on Ancestry is cumbersome and time consuming. 

I am working on a number resea
rch projects that involve people about whom much less is known than I know about my grandfather. These are the situations in which the limitations of the Ancestry search function is less than satisfactory...and don't even get me started about the silly search function for the vintage newspaper collection on Ancestry which pulls bits of two different words together to make a single word "matching" your search term!

What I would like is a search function that is more accurate and can be defined more narrowly if needed...if I give the name of a person who was born, died, and resided in Alaska in a given time period, I am pretty much not interested in 400,000 people with similar names living in the other 48 states in other time periods.

I know...picky, picky!

In short, I've been using Ancestry since its inception and will continue to do so (or at least until my dwindling 401K and Ancestry's increasingly horrendous subscription price bring my research to an end) but from time to time I feel the urge to vent my frustration.  Consider my frustration vented!

Carla  


-----Original Message-----
From: Kith-n-Kin <Kith-n-Kin at cox.net>
To: 'or-roots mail list' <or-roots at listsmart.osl.state.or.us>
Sent: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 7:57 am
Subject: Re: [or-roots] Ancestry.com




I rarely have a problem of “too many hits” when I look someone up – unless, of course, there are a bazillion of them.

 

Could you give us a name and parameters so we can try to replicate what’s
 happening? I’ve not been able to figure out what the problem is.

 

Pat (in Tucson)

 

 


From: or-roots-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us [mailto:or-roots-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us] On Behalf Of cklooster at aol.com
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 11:58 PM
To: or-roots at listsmart.osl.state.or.us
Subject: Re: [or-roots] Ancestry.com


 

Ancestry.com...the site you love to hate...or hate to love.  If they are actually blaming their recent woes on AOL or Firefox, they're delusional.  I have Explorer7 and have been experiencing the same frustration as others posting on this list.  Some of the problems seems to have been resolved, but last night Ancestry wouldn't open several census pages ("try again later") and returned a "This individual is not listed on Worldwide Tree" statement for several different people who were identified on the trees in the search function.  Parts of the site were working but other parts obviously were not.  The website continues to be slow-slow-slow to load.  I suspect that they've outgrown their technical capabilities and are trying to play catch-up.  I continue to be frustrated with their search function that returns a bazillion people no matter how restrictive you set the search parameters.  I do think it is worthwhile to keep giving them feedback about the aspects of the site that are less than stellar.  The areas that are identified as problematic by the most people will undoubtedly get the most attention...squeaky wheel and all that.  


Carla


-----Original Message-----
From: JOHN LAURA MCKINNEY birdman_326 at msn.com


Hi, folks.  I called ancestry, and they told me that folks using aol or firefox has been an issue since updating.  They had me load int. explorer 7 and now I can get in.  Thanks,  Laura



 



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