Are Ancestry's Search Issues Causing You to Miss Important Records About Your Ancestors?

Overall, Ancestry does a fairly good job of turning up records – especially when you help it along by utilizing your own skills as much as possible.

But Ancestry’s search definitely has some limitations and, in some cases, these can be very detrimental to your research. Most of these limitations are not intentional on Ancestry’s part; instead, they are often a result of Ancestry’s attempt to help researchers along. Ancestry has developed numerous helpers in search forms that generally make our job as researchers easier, but some of them can inadvertently cause major issues if used incorrectly.

One of these helpers can cause so many missed records that we felt it was important to call it out in its own lesson – the location autocomplete.

When we enter information into one of Ancestry’s search forms we often include a location. This information is a vital part of narrowing down our results and helping us locate records that have the greatest likelihood of being relevant to our person in question. You have probably noticed that as you start typing a location into a location box Ancestry begins to autocomplete for you.

This is extremely convenient, of course. It helps ensure that we have the name of the location spelled correctly, adds a county to a city search and helps us locate places we may not remember the name of ourselves. It also shows us possible related locations. But the autocomplete can also mislead us and cause us to miss relevant records.

This can happen when we begin a search for a name and lean too much on the autocomplete to find an answer for us, when we use the autocomplete to assume a location without verifying our sources carefully, or when we are not cautious in making sure that the place we are choosing is the place we intend. It would not be terribly difficult, for instance, to confuse Walnut Grove, North Carolina with Walnut Grove, South Carolina if we were in a hurry.

But the bigger concern actually stems from the way record collections format their locations, and the way Ancestry autocompletes the same locations for us.

Let’s look at an example.

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In this example we’re going to research Johnson Worton in the 1910 Census collection. We suspect that Johnson lived in Saint Louis, Missouri during this time period and we would like to see if we can locate him. Let’s see what happens when we search for him in this city directly in the 1910 census.

We type in Johnson Worton, leaving the searches inexact, and then type in the city.

Ancestry now begins to autocomplete our search. Here’s what we see.

We select Saint Louis, Missouri, USA – the first option – leave it inexact and conduct our search. What we get are about a 1000 results. But as we begin to scroll through them we notice that the vast majority of them appear NOT to actually be from Saint Louis.

We check to make sure we used the “Lived in” search box (the appropriate box to search for someone living in a certain location during a census year). We did.

Since our goal with this 1910 Census search was to utilize a narrow data set based on location (so that we can try some creative techniques to locate our ancestor) we don’t want to see these other locations at all. We’re hoping that by making the city exact we can find our elusive ancestor despite any name variations. The “exact” feature allows us to make sure we’re only looking in Saint Louis.

Let’s try our search again. This time we decide to make our city exact, to weed out these unwanted locations. When we do this though, we get no results. This seems rather unusual, given how large of a city Saint Louis is – even in 1910.

Next, we try searching only for Worton in this city, no first name. But, again, we get no results.

This seems highly unusual. Certainly you would expect that there would be some possible matches to the name Worton in such a large city – especially when our last name field is set to inexact.

We decide to do a test. Let’s search only for the location with no other entries in the form. This should bring up every person who was recorded as living in Saint Louis in 1910.

Only 27 results? And 7 of them are in Minnesota. Now we know that Ancestry isn’t listing the people from this place correctly.

What can we do?

A loose location search wasn’t giving us good results, and neither was an exact search. We need to be able to see only people who lived in Saint Louis.

We could try searching for St. Louis or other name variations (we did this and the results were still very mixed with other locations or returned no results) OR we could try another strategy that has worked for us before. We need to find out how the record collection listed this place and search for that.

Every record set used its own methods for listing place names and Ancestry doesn’t always show us all of these options in its autocomplete. Because place names can vary quite a bit in some cases, and names or spellings sometimes changed as did conventions for shortening names, we need to understand how exactly the collection we are searching has listed the place we are targeting. We may even find it listed our place more than one way.

We can do this a couple of ways. Since Saint Louis is a very large city we guess that if we search for all records in Missouri in the 1910 Census that Saint Louis is bound to come up pretty quickly.

We’re right, the third listing is for a person living in Saint Louis – and we have now found the source of our issue. Saint Louis is listed as Saint Louis City in the 1910 census.

You will see in the screen shot at the start of this post that Ancestry never suggested that as an option, and even when we type in the name ourselves, Saint Louis City, it still does not suggest it. It doesn’t suggest it as an option at all until we get to the state part.

We go ahead and type in this place – Saint Louis City, Missouri, USA – and make it exact. We don’t search for anything else because we want to verify that Ancestry will now pull the correct records for this place.

But now we get over 3 million results. We know the population of the city was around 690,000 in 1910 (based on Wikipedia data) so we are obviously getting far too many results. And we can also see that many unrelated locations are still showing up.

Next we try searching for just Saint Louis City (removing the state and country) and making that exact. Now we get about 2,000 results – not nearly enough and none of them seem to be our location.

1We’re going to have to get creative.

Let’s bypass the location field altogether and place our location directly in the keyword box instead. This is found near the end of the form. We’ll make it exact.

For this to work we must make sure we have spelled the location exactly as it appears in the record collection (this could be a city, county or parish, or even a specific street or ward depending on what we are looking for). We must also remember to remove the locations we already entered in.

When we conduct this search, we get nearly 690,000 entries – which matches perfectly with what we know about the population of that city in 1910.

Every entry shows a person who is listed as living in Saint Louis City and only Saint Louis City. We have finally achieved our goal.

A search for the surname Worton with this keyword in place brings up the records we were looking for originally – Wortons living in Saint Louis only. The first record is a match to our ancestor.

We were able to find this record finally because we were searching ONLY in Saint Louis City and there were only 15 Wortons living in the city at the time.

Our record came up number one but, even if it had not, we would have been able to easily browse through the results to find a match. We found this record even though Johnson’s first name and his wife’s first name were different than what we had in our records. While this record did not show up in more general searches limiting ourselves to a specific city, and knowing how to properly sort by that city, allowed us zero in and find what we needed. We could have easily tried additional name spellings if needed as well.

You can now see how easy it would have been to miss this record if we had not taken the time to figure out what was happening with the location. We may have easily assumed – as our initial searches showed — that there were no results for Wortons in that location and missed this record entirely.

If we had been using the All Collections form or the Census and Voter lists category we may not have picked up on this issue at all because our results would have been mixed with so many other collections – each with different naming systems for places. This is another reason to try and use individual collections whenever possible.

This example illustrates the importance of understanding the record collections you are searching, the limitations of Ancestry’s autocomplete and search algorithm and the importance of being flexible in your search.

When searching a record collection, whether you are using exact or inexact locations (or other fields), take the time to make sure your locations match those in the collection you are targeting. Don’t count on Ancestry’s autocomplete and use the keyword box if you need to get an exact match.

This is a good time to note that, especially with locations, using the correct search field is important. Ancestry often offers several location fields that seem related (such as Lived In and Any Event) but each has benefits and limitations that will change your results. 

Important tips for finding an exact location spelling for an individual record collection and making the most of location searches.

1. One way to find exact location names is to go to the main search form for the collection and look to the right. You will see a Browse This Collection box. Oftentimes the box contains a list of locations included in the collection. By sorting through these you can usually find the exact spellings of the locations included.

2. Some collections don’t have Browse options, and others allow browsing by name or other factors only. In this case you will have to try another method. You can try our trick above by simply searching a general subset of the database and hope you come across the location name or you can try typing in the the name of a location in the keyword box, leaving it inexact, and browsing through results until you see a match.

3. If this does not work, look though the collection description and see if you can find a list of locations mentioned.

4. Remember that location naming systems are not always intuitive. One collection may list records with only counties, others might exclude counties completely. Names and county boundaries regularly changed over time so make sure you are searching in a county and with a name that was applicable at the time the record was completed. In this case, Saint Louis City separated from Saint Louis County and thus was called out with the word “city” in the name. A good way to understand a city’s history is to type the name into Google and read up on its history on Wikipedia or local historical sites.

5. Ancestry offers several filtering options for locations (in the dropdown under a location search field). Take the time to try each and understand how they influence your results (narrowing or widening). When in need, bypass these fields altogether.

6. Don’t assume that just because some records come up for your location that all the records are showing up. Try this trick even when you do get results and you may uncover more.

Best of luck with your searches! For more help with your Ancestry research check out our online course center which includes both a 21-Day Ancestry Crash Course and a specialized 14-Day research challenge to help you build your skills. 

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