Genealogy Chat

not matching except for name and date, but having thought about it I realised that there is a lot of sense in not matching the place. My reason? Not everyone enters a place the same way, for example, the same person could be entered by different people in different formats. I have in the past complained to GR about this as Ryde Isle of Wight is considered different from Ryde, Isle of Wight just because someone remembered to put a comma. Also Ryde, I o W is another separate listing. Perhaps there is a case for GR insisting on a Country of birth and just using that as a matchfinder. They would certainly be unable to dictate a specific form for the whole address.

If people had to enter a specific place from a scroll down menu it would help-and like you say we would have 50 versions of the same place which has happened before and are all listed seperately.

My ancestor was born in Winterbourne Kingston, Dorset. The first software I used wouldn't accept that many characters in a field, so he's shown as W'bourne Kingston. But what he said on each census was North Kingston. Or even just Kingston. Or what about Cranleigh, that used to be spelt Cranley? My Portsmouth ancestors might give Portsea, Portsmouth, Landport and Kingston as birthplaces on different censuses. Given the typos, changes in spelling etc and changes in administrative districts: Greenwich London, or Greenwich Kent? Sunderland Durham or Tyne and Wear? I prefer to accept the problems as I don't see an easy way to resolve them.

Well, it would be nice if the countries matched at the very least. We are given options such as England, Scotland, France, Spain, New Zealand, Australia etc so if we had to put them in they could be used to narrow the search criteeria.

I would like to see a match on county and birth year +/- 1. Many people calculate a birth year from census entries thus sometimes a year out. Though hot matches wouldn't match us, I have found some good contacts where we have had people down with birth years slightly amiss! Jenny :-)

other sites have scroll down lists-sites worth far less than this one-that way-details would be standardised when submitting details-at the monment the search engine on here cant even cope with shortlisting for a given county-the screen goes skewiff -it relies on say liverpool Lancashire,rather than Lancashire.