Genealogy Chat

A two part problem here. First, can someone do a 1901 look up for me? I have George Loughton, a railway porter living in Wealdstone, born in 1869 In St Pancras, London on the 1901 census search engine on genes connected. However, when I go to our local library which offers free Ancestry.com search facilities using the Ancestry search engine I cannot find the correct George Loughton! I need to know if George Loughton is living with his wife Ellen and how many children they have. There should certainly be son George who would be three or four and perhaps daughter Gladys who would be a few months. Any other information such as address, where born would also be useful. But this is not the first situation where I have found the Ancestry search engine lacking. Is there potential problem with Ancestry's indexing or search engine?

Before I start hunting, I hope you don't mind if I take advantage of the fact that GR garbles only the messages, and not Replies, to copy-paste your original message in a form where the info is easier to pick out,... Original Added by Andy Day on 16/07/2006 20:01:09 Problems with Ancestry A two part problem here. First, can someone do a 1901 look up for me? I have George Loughton, a railway porter living in Wealdstone, born in 1869 In St Pancras, London on the 1901 census search engine on genes connected. However, when I go to our local library which offers free Ancestry search facilities using the Ancestry search engine I cannot find the correct George Loughton! I need to know if George Loughton is living with his wife Ellen and how many children they have. There should certainly be George who would be three or four and perhaps Gladys who would be a few months. Any other information such as address, where born would also be useful. But this is not the first situation where I have found the Ancestry search engine lacking. Is there potential problem with Ancestry's indexing or search engine?

I was just about to post that when I ''refreshed'' the page and spotted your reply! Looking at the image - he is a railway porter. They're at Gordon Villa, St Kilda's Rd (and it does look like Kilda, not Hilda) Christine

Yes Gill! Corldstone! Wealdstone, but it doesn't surprise me, I have relatives in Plumer. (Pinner)!

Yes Gordon Villas in St Kilda Road, still there today.

The problems with the Ancestry search are often down to the qualiy of the transcription. Some mistakes are understandable (the enumerators weren't picked for the clarity of their handwriting!); some are clearly just careless (e.g. whole families given the name of the family above); some are inexplicable (clear writing but gobbledegook names). You can get round a lot of the errors by ... 1] using Soundex 2] using wildcards (? = a single character, * = any number of characters, including none at all). Ancestry only allows wildcards after a minimum of three letters. 3] not putting in all the info which defines your target - in fact putting in as little as possible, while still having only a reasonable number of ''hits'' Christine

Thanks for the hints Christine, I didn't know you could use wildcards.

If these are the children: Name: George Albert V Loughton Year of Registration: 1897 Quarter of Registration: Apr-May-Jun District: Hendon County: Greater London, Middlesex Volume: 3a Page: 170 and Name: Gladys Frances E Loughton Year of Registration: 1901 Quarter of Registration: Jul-Aug-Sep District: Hendon County: Greater London, Middlesex Volume: 3a Page: 210 then they won'r show up on the 1901 census, because Gladys probably wasn't born until afterwards, and, sadly... Name: George Albert V Loughton Birth Date: abt 1897 Year of Registration: 1898 Quarter of Registration: Oct-Nov-Dec Age at death: 1 District: Hendon County: Greater, London, Middlesex Volume: 3a Page: 94 Christine

Thanks for that Christine, I hadn't looked on freeBMD for a while so hadn't seen Georges death. Gladys was a long shot!