Friday, October 30, 2015

Finding Hints by Person or Surname on Findmypast

I have written several posts about getting and using Hints on Findmypast.com - see:

*  First Look at FindMyPast Hints in My Tree (5 January 2015)
*  Checking Out My Findmypast Family Tree Hints (24 June 2015)

1)  I checked my Findmypast family tree today, which has about 42,920 persons in it, and there are many more Hints than the last time I checked.  Here is a view of my Findmypast family tree.  The number of Hints for each person are in the orange circles on each profile icon:


If I want to see all of my Hints on Findmypast, I can click on the orange "Hints" button at the top of the screen above.  When I do that, the Hints page shows that I have 18,283 Hints:


I don't want to look at those one Hint at a time.  I could look at them one person at a time from the tree or from the orange Hint number on the person's name on the screen above.

2)  There is a Filter search field below the database title on the screen above that says "Search by surname."  I put "richman" in the filter search field and saw:


I thought that would be more manageable for me - to concentrate on one surname, but I don't think I'll use it much.  That leaves the Hints for a specific person.

3)  I clicked on the orange Hint indicator for the first Hint above, and easily saw the six Hints for John Richman (1788-1867):


4)  My preference is that Hints be provided by record collection - in other words, all of the Hints for a census collection (e.g., 1851 England and Wales), a marriage record collection (e.g., England Marriages), a burial collection (e.g., Billion Graves), etc.  I find that reviewing them one collection at a time is the most efficient way to review and utilize the records that I have missed adding to my family tree.

I hope that Findmypast will add a feature that can search for Hints by record collection, rather than by person or surname.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/10/finding-hints-by-person-or-surname-on.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.


1 comment:

cleaverkin said...

I wish everyone would provide a "show hints by database" feature, especially Ancestry. I think they did do it briefly for the 1940 census, just after the index was released, but not anymore.