Genealogy Chat

Pls see below.

If I do a general search on the home page, it seems that no matter what I put in, it does it's own sweet thing and starts at A in 18??. I enter Ralph Snape, 1935 and it starts at A in 18?? and goes right the way through the alphabet for each year - Grrrrrrrr!!! Am I missing something? Was it also so naff and annoying? Is the only way really to go through each year on the BMD bit? When you really don't know where to look and have a possible 15 or so years to check, is there no quicker way than going through 4 scans for each blasted year?? Please don't go looking for Ralph Snape as I did eventually find him yesterday - tried to get on here to ask you all then but couldn't get on the site (which wound me up even more of course!! lol). Please can someone tell me if I am missing something? - oh, and I am not doing exact searches cos I know they turn up jack all!!! Thanks in advance.

I had problems with not being able to put in the page number and using the goto button, it just didn't work for me but other peps had no problem. But I have found downloading there extra viewer or advanced viewer whatever they call it solved the problem, or rather it seemed to work yesterday. Josie

Andrea, what happens is if Ancestry can't find what you are looking for then it lists everything from the beginning which is close - that means all known people with the same surname that you have entered. Lin

Thank heavens someone else has the same problems

Andrea What are you hoping to find about him, maybe someone might be able to point you in the right direction? Looby

this is the address for BMD http://www.ancestry(.)co.uk/search/rectype/vital/freebmd/bmd.aspx Remove brackets Jeanette

have you got exact matches only ticked un tick that and you get quite a few. but in the year you want only one thats near. so best to go on index with the address i have given you Jeanette

Ann from Sussex I also search the same way as you - but I have come across a problem with their site. Sometimes not all quarters are shown for a particular year, which if you aren't aware of the problem would lead you to think there weren't any entries for that name that quarter when of course there are. So a bit of juggling with names to get the quarter to show needs to be done sometimes. mary p.s. Sorry for my lack of ettiquette - didn't mean to hijack your thread Andrea

I do a lot of searches in Ancestry. The other day I was doing a seach for a lady who was struggling to find someone with an unusual surname that could have been spelt several ways. I just couldn't find him so I put up the first name Thomas in Lancashire for 1891 and got about 12,000. Narrowed it by entering his birth year plus or minus 2 yrs which took it down to 4000 or so.I just scrolled the pages in big jumps to the first letter of his surname name and there he was on the third page of looking spelled differently again. I've done this many times with Italian or foreign names names and it works very well. Brian