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Note: You may wish to read all of the comments and replies to this blog post. The problem outlined here may be an indication of serious problems with the entries and the way that the search engine identifies the individual.
My friend, Holly Hansen, alerted me to this problem with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The above record was found as the result of a search in the Historical Record Collections. The person found is identified as Charles Denham LVL8-N4H. However, when you go to look at this person's Detail page, you get the following:
Now we find Charles Donnom LVL8-N4H which is, by the way, the correct spelling for the surname. Now if we go back and do a search for Charles Donnom with the same search parameters, we get the following:
It is interesting to note that there are, at least, two duplicates for this person. There are two more duplicate records for Charles Donnom.
It seems like this person's entries have enough problems without also showing the wrong surname in a search. Holly will be working all this out shortly.
The search results are showing Denham, because that name is also listed as an alternate name on LVL8-N4H. The alternate names listed in Other Information on the person's detail page are interchangeable in the search parameters.
ReplyDeleteOh well, sometimes I need to write more rather than less. The anomaly is that the reference to the name comes up with the name "Denham" as an alternate to "Donnom" when the search is made for Denham. This does not fall into any of your examples. The man's name was never "Denham" We have birth record for him and his birth name was Donnom. The Denham name comes from an improper merge with another person by the name of Denham. So, this search is not leading you to the same person and the name is not correct or an alternative of the correct surname. The birth name listed is incorrect for the person named Donnom LVL8-N4H. The issue is that the search came up with an alternative name for the person with the same ID number. By the way, the wife is also wrong and all the children are not the children of this family with a father named Donnom. There were no name changes. The information is just wrong and the search is misleading and weird. Why would a search for a specific name come up with the search name rather than the name in the details section? See below also.
DeleteThis isn't an anomaly at all: it's how the person search is supposed to work.
ReplyDeleteLook at the alternate names section for the person. It contains two names William Charles Denham and Charles Denham. Any alternate name for a person can be found using the name search and the search results will show that as the name for a person, rather than showing the primary name of the person as the name of the person.
This is why I favour getting rid of the vast majority of alternative names that people have put into the system as most of them are just either rubbish or trivial variants of the actual full name. So in your case it might be Mr Tanner; Mr J Tanner; J Tanner; Jim Tanner etc. For your wife it might be Mrs Tanner, Mrs James Tanner etc. In the vast majority of instances there should be the main name of the person, and for a man no variant names at all, whereas for a woman one variant name which is the married name. The married name is different enough from the maiden name to be a significant and it is used enough in official documents and other sources that it is useful to be able to search by it.
What should be better is the presentation of the search results. When the search result is not the primary name for the profile then this should be noted and the primary name of the profile should also be given.
If you want many examples of the full extent of this problem try searching for that wonderful surname Unknown and then see what the primary name for an awful lot of the profiles in the results is.
I certainly agree and I routinely delete the "Birth Names" unless they are actual alternative names used in sources that might help in identifying the person. Here the "Birth Names" are not the same person at all. William Charles Denham is not Charles Donnom. If you look at the List of All Changes, you will see that there are clearly two different people here. The issue is the that a search for Denham came up with a result of Denham when the name was Donnom.
DeleteI've been enjoying your blogs over the past months. They've been so flawless there has been nothing to comment on for a while.
ReplyDeleteThe feature you report on here is neither an anomaly nor a flaw. Family Tree has worked like this ever since opening and I'm a bit surprised you have not run across it before now. What you are demonstrating above, is that when one searches for a name in Family Tree, the search routine looks at the main names and all alternate names. In Holly's example Charles Donnom is the name under Vitals and Charles Denham is one of two names under Other Information.
Let's take a man named Arthur Adams who was adopted at age ten and changed his name to Benjamin Bennett then became an actor and used the name Charles Clark the rest of his life. His Family Tree detail page should list all three names with Arthur Adams under Vitals and the other two under Other Information.
The Find function is designed such that if you search for Arthur Adams, the results list will show Arthur Adams; if you search for Benjamin Bennett, the results list will show Benjamin Bennett; and if you search for Charles Clark, the results list will show Charles Clark and all these results will lead you to the same, correct person.
The programmers clearly had other choices. They could have made it so that when you search for Charles Clark the results listed Arthur Adams. Or they could have come up with some way to list all three alternate names without making the results list totally illegible. However, I think they made the right decision. I think that most people, if they searched for Charles Clark and saw Arthur Adams in the list would think the search routine was horribly flawed, never click on the Arthur Adams to see why he was there, and never find the Charles Clark being searched for. By listing Charles Clark, the person will click on the result, jump to the correct page, and then be able to work on learning about this man's name changes.
Oh well, sometimes I need to write more rather than less. The anomaly is that the reference to the name comes up with the name "Denham" as an alternate to "Donnom" when the search is made for Denham. This does not fall into any of your examples. The man's name was never "Denham" We have birth record for him and his birth name was Donnom. The Denham name comes from an improper merge with another person by the name of Denham. So, this search is not leading you to the same person and the name is not correct or an alternative of the correct surname. The birth name listed is incorrect for the person named Donnom LVL8-N4H. The issue is that the search came up with an alternative name for the person with the same ID number. By the way, the wife is also wrong and all the children are not the children of this family with a father named Donnom. There were no name changes. The information is just wrong and the search is misleading and weird. Why would a search for a specific name come up with the search name rather than the name in the details section?
DeleteHummmm, sounds like you may need to rework this entire post. You are saying there is something wrong with the Search and Find routines and how they interact with a Family Tree person record. Sounds like what you meant to say was that this person's Family Tree record has a lot of problems.
DeleteThat has nothing to do with the Search and Find routines. Those are completely dependent on the data on the FamilyTree record.
You say that Denham should not be there as an alternate name. That's fine. But there is no way for the Search and Find routines to know that. The name is sitting right there and, therefore, will be found by those routines. Remove the alternate name and remove any sources that are for Mr. Denham but not for Mr. Donnom and the Search and Find routine results will change to reflect those corrections on the record.
"Why would a search for a specific name come up with the search name rather than the name in the details section?" Because it looks at all the names on the details page, not just the one in the Vitals section and it cannot determine that a specific name in the Other Information section should not be there. All it can determine is that it is there.
The problem is that the search results changed the primary detail name to correspond to the search term. The fact that the search term was also an alternate name is not the point. The results for the search should have come up with Donnom with his ID number as a possible suggestion. Including the "birth names' is the problem. These birth names come from the previous merges and variations found in all of the submitted records back to the 1800s. If the search results show the birth name on the record found with the ID number of the person there is an implied ratification of the wrong name, and in this case, the wrong person. You are saying that "there is no way for the Search and Find" routines to know that the designations included in "Birth Names" do not include garbage from the past 100+ years? I don't see the problem with some latitude for "Alternative Names" that have been purposefully added by someone, but the birth names are not alternate names if they reflect improper merges current or historical. You are right that the article may need to be rewritten to warn people that the search terms that come up for a person may not be accurate for that person despite the name being an alternative name.
DeleteI agree with Gordon that you've mischaracterised the problem in the post. In fact I think we're dealing with the interaction of two separate problems here. The two problems being:
Delete1. Junk in the alternate names section
2. Presentation of name search result hits from the alternate names section
The first is a function of the history of FSFT and there is nothing we can do except to go through the profiles and remove the junk manually. The second is what I alluded to when I talked about improving the presentation of search results. I agree that the primary name of a profile should always be shown on the search results page and that the alternate name that has caused the search result hit should also be shown with an indication as to whether it is classified as a Birth Name, Also Known As, Nickname or Married Name.
Frankly if I see something classified as a Birth Name I almost always consider it to be useless junk. It's either been put there through automatic imports or by people who have no idea what they're doing. A Married Name on the other hand is very useful, and I've added quite a few of them myself. I don't tend to use the Nickname or Also Known As classifications particularly.
The recent dumbing-down of the search engine options by getting rid of burial and christening search options doesn't exactly fill me with hope that this issue will be sorted out.
You are probably correct that had the unwanted "Birth Names" been removed there would not have been an anomalous results from the search, but the Search should show the "primary detail page name" rather than any alternative. If the name is an alternative, the search should indicate that fact as you indicate.
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