General Chat

about time Genes taught it's computer systen that Co. Durham is nowhere near Somerset, Lancashire, London, Australia, Canada etc etc etc.
It's maddening going through pages and pages of hotmatches that only match through a name and sometimes not even that!!
Carol

dont be silly that would be to easy

This topic comes up at least one a month.

I was involved with a place and name matching project a few years ago for a well known high street B bank, and believe me, it is not that simple. After spending the best part of £5 million, we had to accept that there had to be major user interface to make the final decision, for example, that Boston Lincs was not the same as Boston USA, and that West Brom was the same as W Bromwich etc etc etc.

The computing power needed to run checks on multiple variotions is absolutely enormous, and therfore costly, which is one reason that I suspect GR have to draw a line.

The big problem, which apart from the sheer cost, which prevents the GR techies from coming up with an answer is that there are just too many variations in which place names can be spelled.

Yes it would be nice, but at the moment GR don't match on place names,

Quite so, BrinsleyS,

thats also considering the fact that sometimes the birth location is NOT known so an (un)educated guess comes into play

like B.Green= bethnal green......= London, even =uk.....all true but not necessarily accurate......

Bob

also methinks(although I have no idea of how much computing power would be required) for all legitimate locations to be held in a database and the inputter would have to choose one from a dropdown list, just a thought....

Bob
i'll get me 'at!

Maggie - you too! I had not realised there was anybody else not getting their hot matches - welcome to the club.
lol
Tina

Yes, the drop down for a place name is fine - GR are mapping this at the moment, you can see it when searching, so maybe they can use it for future HotMatches. Basically in programing terms you link the options to an index file and do your matching across the index, rather than the actual place names in the main file.

However, allowing free format gedcoms to be uploaded doesn't help one bit. I have seen loads without date nor place name - it makes you wonder what some people are up to.

i can understand the place names now I've had that marvelous explanation, lol
But how do you explain
Elizabeth Kirk b 1830 = John Winchester b1880,(orsomething like that - i deleted it) not even the same sex!!!
Unless the puter was having a "wobbly"
Carol x

I hade the "Elizabeth Kirk b 1830 = John Winchester b1880," thingy about 18 months and queried it.

The explanation was that either me or the other member had uploaded a new gedcom, just after the last HotMatch run, but that it would sort itself out next time around, which true to word it did.

I don't actually mind going through hotmatches, it gives me something to do for half an hour. On average about 50% are way out, 30% possibilities and 20% worth following up.

Is this to do with hot-matches only, or to do with searching records in general. I have been gien some strange outcomes there, too.