Wednesday, April 11, 2018

More Searching for Eulalia - Curiouser! FIXED!

I wrote Something's Wrong With Ancestry Pennsylvania Death Certificates Search on Monday.  In that post, I found that some searches for persons in the Pennsylvania Death Certificates collection on Ancestry.com were not found by a search of the specific database.  I don't know how many can't be found, but the one I chose, randomly, couldn't be found, even though it was in the database (I posted an image of the 1955 death certificate for Eulalia Conner.

My friend, Barry, emailed me to say that searching for Eulalia Conner in the normal search box on the Ancestry.com home page or search page.  I tried that:

Here is the search results for first name = "eulalia" (exact) and last name = "conner" (exact):

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Down the list is the link for the Pennsylvania Death Certificates collection, and I clicked it to see the Record summary page for the record:


I clicked on the green "View" button to see the image:


Yep, that's her!!  So searching for a person from the general search page works.

I thought "Maybe Ancestry.com fixed it in the last two days."  So I went to the "Pennsylvania Death Certificates, 1906-1966" record collection and searched again for Eulalia Conner dying in 1955 using the exact search criteria:


It found "Mrs. Elizabeth Conner" again like the earlier post.  It still doesn't find the right person when I search in the specific database.

I searched using only the first name "eulalia" and "1955" and it didn't find her.  It did find "Mrs. Elizabeth Conner" again.

It's curious, isn't it?  Strange, too.  How does this happen?

UPDATED 13 April 2018:  My reader also emailed the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commisson (PHMC) on 9 April, and they responded saying that  they were aware of the problem on Ancestry.  Today, the problem with the search and index for this record collection on Ancestry.com was fixed.

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1 comment:

magscanner said...

I've been trying some simple searches on Ancestry.com for the last couple of days, and not getting results I know are there. I have no personal knowledge, but I suspect they're having some problems in linking their databases to the search tools.