Tips for using ancestry's new search

[kiterunner]

I thought we should have a thread for tips for ancestry's "new search" as it is taking a bit of getting used to for some of us! Hopefully those who have been using it for a while can come up with some, but this is one I came up with as someone was asking about it on Facebook:

If you are searching the England and Wales Birth Index 1837-1915 (ie. the FreeBMD one), to search on mother's maiden name for the 1911-1915 births, put the mother's maiden name into the main surname field.

For example, if you want to find births with surname Brown and MMN Smith, type Brown Smith into the surname field.

[kiterunner]

Also, so we can find it easily, this is ancestry's help article about the new search, though I think it is out of date:
http://help.ancestry.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5569/kw/5569

[JBee]

Thanks Kite - that's very useful.

[Merry]

Has anyone been able to make any of the location fields work? I gave up on those ages ago and put place names in the Keywords box. This works OK, but means I get more results than with the old search, as obviously there's no differentiation between where someone lives and where they were born.

[Merry]

Watch out that in some search screens (it may be all of them!) if you chose to add a variable for the date of a birth, marriage, death or general event such as +/- 2 years, you must select B, M, D or other BEFORE you select the +/- 2 years (or whatever) as if you select the type of event after the variable the variable reverts to Exact year.

Well, I know what I mean!..... :o

[Mary from Italy]

That is useful, Kite, but what an incredibly stupid way to program the search.

[Mary from Italy]

One thing I didn't notice for a while: normally, if I do a search and don't get the result I want, I go back to the search page and change something, like the date or whatever.

I normally do this by using the back button on my browser, which worked with the Old Search, but it doesn't now, because it just clears all the fields. You have to click on Edit Search to get back to your original search.

It means that all my searches are taking twice as long, because I automatically use the back button.

[Merry]

I haven't found that to be any different than before, Mary!

I can use the back button on my browser to take me any number of levels back except for the last one that would take me to the first Search screen. If I click back to that one all fields are emptied, but it was exactly the same for me with the Old search.

[Sue from Southend]

I've found that by acknowledging Ancestry's suggestions for place names that I get a better response ie Bethnal Green, Middlesex, England rather than just Bethnal Green (even in the LMA records!)

I must admit that I quite like the "edit search" facility, it's quicker way to change just one search field.

[Merry]

I've found that by acknowledging Ancestry's suggestions for place names that I get a better response ie Bethnal Green, Middlesex, England rather than just Bethnal Green (even in the LMA records!)



That's the thing that doesn't work for me! As far as I can see if I select Bethnal green, Middlesex, England (their suggestion) I only get results with those words included, so anyone whose entry just says Bethnal green or Betnall Green etc doesn't seem to get included in the results. I've just tried changing the selection choice under the location box to default setting rather than exact and that helped a bit but I think it pushed the mis-spelled transcriptions further down the lest than the old search would have done, which I don't like! lol

[Mary from Italy]

I haven't found that to be any different than before, Mary!

I can use the back button on my browser to take me any number of levels back except for the last one that would take me to the first Search screen. If I click back to that one all fields are emptied, but it was exactly the same for me with the Old search.

It was the same for me with the Old Search only if I used the main "search all records" page.

However, I rarely use that one; I generally go directly to the database I'm interested in (e.g. a particular census, etc.).

[Merry]

I think there are so many ways to use the Ancestry site as a whole, I bet you could take 50 researchers and assess their use of the site only to find they're using 50 different methods!

[Kit]

It could possibly be more than 50 Merry.

I have FTM and often search through the program as I find it easier to add the records to my tree. The green leaf thing can come up with some useful things.

[kiterunner]

Another tip which we have come across on here - if you are looking for a Mc / Mac surname, try searching with or without a space after the Mc / Mac as you will get completely different results.

[kiterunner]

My number 1 tip now would be, after you have done your search and it has come back with way too many records, click on "Edit Search", check that the "Match all terms exactly" box is ticked, click Search again, and you may find that the number of matches drops dramatically. This can happen even if you had that box ticked in the first place, because it seems to ignore it the first time.