Aaaarrgh Ancestry

[kathleenmitchell]

Hello All,

Will Ancestry never learn?  I am on the new ancestry site which is being rolled out to all, and I could chuck a brick at the computer, not only has the colour changed but it is pick up my family details and showing them wrongly.

I have relatives who lived on Wellington St Greenock, Ancestry has picked it up and shows Wellington New Zealand!!,  another lived in Perth Scotland, this has now become Perth Australia, another died in Greenock, which has now become Greenock Pennsylvania, when you go into each individually the details are still correct, but when looking at them as a highlight of a relatives details they are wrong.

Has anyone else come across this?

thanks
Kathy

[groom]

Lots - there's a whole thread here.

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=727605.0

[KGarrad]

Essentially, you have failed to add a country (Scotland) to the place names!

So, Ancestry finds what it thinks is the right place?!

It's easy enough to add the country

[groom]

According to the reply I had from Ancestry though, they are aware of the problem and are working on a solution. I was told by them that it shouldn't be necessary to go through and change them all manually.

I do know it is an American site, but as all but a very few of my relations were born and died in the UK, I didn't consider it necessary to have to add England all the time, especially as my tree is private for my own use. To me it made more sense to add USA or Australia when they died outside the UK. Oh well, we learn the hard way!

[andrewalston]

Ever since the introduction of the "new search", place names have been assumed to be in the US unless you specify otherwise. This appears to be intended to cater for the mass of US subscribers, who have only a very sketchy concept of geography.
It is only very recently that they have tweaked the place name lookup boxes to bring UK places to the top of their list when referring to UK databases.
They have also relaxed their rules on place names being used for database lookups. Previously, where a place of birth on a census sheet, say, was written, and correctly transcribed, as "Birmingham", the person could not be found, because it did not exactly match the Ancestry Gazetteer, which had the place as "Birmingham, Warwickshire, England". It still does not allow wildcards, but it is an improvement.
Some places are still not in the Gazetteer, or are badly defined, so will never be located. Tower Hamlets, for example, is claimed by Ancestry to be in Kent, rather than north of the Thames in Middlesex, so we have to resort to the "Keywords" box if we are to locate relevant records.

[Rosinish]

When errors like that are obvious people should email & complain otherwise they wont know.

There is also a London in Ontario & an England somewhere.

Don't know why they need their automatic assumption anyway.

I now know why relatives who are in my tree, never left Scotland but died in every country but on ancestry trees.

Annie.

[Rosinish]

And the price has jumped dramatically

[andrewalston]

When errors like that are obvious people should email & complain otherwise they wont know.

I had quite a correspondence with them about this not long after they killed the old search. I provided a list of about 40 places which I know appear in censuses but not in their gazetteer. Many well-known places in London were on the list.

They have still not updated the gazetteer to match reality.

[johnallot]

Have just been on to the site, go to my account click old site  and answer the reason why
It has put all my information back to how it was.