Ancestry place search for wills is useless - use National Archives instead!

[melba_schmelba]

There seems to be multiple issues here that might prevent you finding wills (not even including the accuracy of name transcription ):

1. The placenames that pop up are only the standardly spelt, and located, places Ancestry has in their index- so you may be missing entries with variations in spelling of the placename because you can't use wildcards.

2. The place may have been in an old regional area that Ancestry doesn't understand, i.e. old Kingdoms, colonies, or Empires.

3. You can't use the keywords field to get round the problem.

A few examples of how many wills the National Archives PCC Will search shows up vs an Ancestry PCC will search:

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=5111

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/wills-1384-1858/

Ancestry PCC will search for 'Aldershot, Hampshire' = 28

National Archives PCC will search for 'Aldershot*' = 67

Ancestry PCC will search for 'Wokingham, Berkshire' = 436

National Archives PCC will search for 'wok*n*h*m* berk*' = 573

It's even worse for non UK places:

Ancestry PCC will search for 'Bombay, Maharashtra' = 87

National Archives PCC will search for 'bomb*y*' = 402

Ancestry PCC will search for 'Smyrna, Izmir, Turkey' = 11

National Archives PCC will search for 'smyrn*' =  46

Presumably this applies to all other will collections too that have placenames that are spelt in an old fashioned way, or included in an old region that Ancestry doesn't understand. This could be pretty easily solved by allowing use of wildcards in placenames - I could have sworn that used to be possible, but it doesn't seem to be anymore .

[BumbleB]

My apologies in advance for this    BUT why would anyone be searching for Wills by location, rather than by name? 

[Gadget]

My apologies in advance for this    BUT why would anyone be searching for Wills by location, rather than by name? 

I was wondering that too 

[melba_schmelba]

My apologies in advance for this    BUT why would anyone be searching for Wills by location, rather than by name? 

Lots of people do place studies, or studies of old colonies or trading outposts . But also if you have an ancestor with a common name and ancestry have mistranscribed, mis indexed, or not indexed at all the place where they lived, you might not find it on an ancestry search because of these problems, but you might find it on the National Archives site.

[melba_schmelba]

My apologies in advance for this    BUT why would anyone be searching for Wills by location, rather than by name? 

I was wondering that too 

An obvious example from above, is if your ancestor lived in Aldershot, and you typed in Aldershot in the lived in field of the search and selected Ancestry's pop up suggestion i.e. Aldershot, Hampshire, England, but this was a pre 1800 will, it might be the will is actually listed under the variant spelling Aldershott, so the will would not show up at all, and would also not show up if you had done a wider search on the county Hampshire. Whereas with the National Archives you can use wildcards in the place field to allow for spelling variations, or just search by county in the place field.

[BumbleB]

I still don't understand 

[melba_schmelba]

I still don't understand 

The issue is the place names on wills vary the further back in time you go, but ancestry only link the current name or very recent alternative i.e. Bombay=Mumbai in their indexes. So any will they have that has a spelling that varies in a way that is not in their index will not be linked to a county, and will not be searchable using wildcards as using wildcards no longer seems possible in the place fields.

Some links about one place studies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-place_study

https://www.one-place-studies.org/

[Edward Scott]

I suggest you use the keyword box for wildcard searches.

I do understand your reasoning as it has been the only way I have been able to track down alternative surname spellings by just working on the place that they lived in. However you will still need imagination as to how it may have been written / transcribed.

Residents of Wisbech or Wisbeach also just used the "Isle of Ely".

Edward

[melba_schmelba]

I suggest you use the keyword box for wildcard searches.

I do understand your reasoning as it has been the only way I have been able to track down alternative surname spellings by just working on the place that they lived in. However you will still need imagination as to how it may have been written / transcribed.

Residents of Wisbech or Wisbeach also just used the "Isle of Ely".

Edward

That is one of the problems I list, the keyword box does not work for place names at least for PCC wills, and I suspect many other records.