Genealogy Chat

If you delete something it shouldn't come back, unless the member uploads a new gedcom and their tree will match all over again from scratch. I have one or two contacts who seem to do this fairly regularly. Same will happen each time you upload a gedcom, all your matches will go and start over again.

Bobs suggestion of a master list of place names is fine for those who enter their names manually, but doesn't work for gedcom uploads.

How many of you have seen names without either a date or place on trees? Not a hope in hades when it comes to matching.

I might add that I do find it helpful when checking Hot Matches to keep Autoroute or some such indexed map open, so that I can do a quick check to see if the birthplace I don't know could possibly be in the same neighbourhood as the name in my tree!

"Place of birth" is an unreliable one for matching - from different sources - censuses, BMD, other trees, etc. - you may get the town, the village, the district, the county, and registration office - so matches would not show up on any routine check and it would therefore be easy for such a check to omit possibles.

I enjoy checking the hot matches as I have had some valuable contacts through them.

John, think about it,
you are not sure of a place of birth, so Hmmm! an Uneducated guess....yes think it was England, Great Britain?or should it be UK?, wales, scotland? london , even?

AH! one of the other lott was born in bethnal green, Oh! thats B green , so maybe there..... or on the other hand, leave it blank, because I dont really know.......unknown, then.......

until there is a dedicated list of ALL places of birth and you will HAVE to choose one , (which again might include guesswork,)Genes CANNOT, as far as I can see introduce a location checker.

Bob

Ps one of my great aunts allegedly( acording to a family members' folklore) went to america with a doctor......a list of names and possible canadian names led ME to believe that it WAS so,....MY research eventually finding that this was all tosh and the american experience happened entirely in the east end of London...

Shat irritates me with "hot matches" is that, even if you do go through and delete ones not applicable, they are back again next time and you have to start all over!

To the uninitiated it seems like an easy task, but in reality it is the opposite. As you add more matching criteria the amount of computer resource, time and cost needed to process a run goes up almost exponentially. Also even then where there is a discrepancy in the match, however small, you still have to rely on the human to make the final decision, otherwise you risk missing something.

I speak from first hand experience having been involved with a name and address matching program for a major bank a few years back. What started out as being a fully automated process ended up with requiring a considerable human overhead to check the near results every day. And that was after a multi-million budget spend.

I don't actually have problem going through checking mine - In fact I quite enjoy it. Keeps me busy for half an hour.

On the face of it, Hot Matches is a good tool, and I have found contacts that I might otherwise not have found ... BUT ...

I have raised the problem (as I see it) of so-called Hot Matches with GR in the past. As far as I'm concerned, it is only a genuine HOT match if there is some correspondence in the PoB as well as Name and YoB.

Fred Nurke born in Australia in 1905 is NOT a HOT match with Fred Nurke born in Glossop in 1905. Sorry GR, it just isn't. I'd like to see at least two levels of Match - HOT (as above) and 'Possible' (what we have now). And I'd like to be able to select whether I see Hot, Possible or neither. At the moment I have no choice, so I rarely bother to even look at them. At the moment I have 63 pages of almost entirely useless so-called Hot Matches to wade through and, almost inevitably, delete.

But GR have told me in the past that it's "too difficult" to do. Which I cannot accept given the widespread use of 'fuzzy matching' techniques in many applications these days.

Gaaaah!



Puff, pant!

:-)

i found most of hot matches are no good but i found one and he had my grand mother in his tree and chared a lot of info with me he saved me a lot of work, i have two families to research and my biological fathers is harder i keep hoping something will come up so i do need to keep checking.

D'you think Big Brother GR is watching us? After saying at 3pm yesterday that I hadn't had hot matches for ages, guess what, I got a load late last night, and guess what else, they were the same old matches I've had before, well, maybe the odd different one.

PP, in 'my account' you can get emails to tell you different things.

I check only the names that are shown in the email that I get


It's strange, but I have found nothing new and no new contacts for at least the last 3 years


................ every single one that I have checked is information that I myself have provided to the other people! Or they are repetitive Hot Matches.


so they just sit there

I too check my hot matches. Sometimes they yield nothing at all but occasionally I find a new contact who gives me the lead I need to break through the brick wall I keep finding myself at.

I also check all my hot matches before I delete, if I ever get any more, that is, only had 1 lot so far this year!

PP, I'm one! As you say it doesn't take that long to check them and new contacts do turn up every now and again.

You could be correct in what you say about hot matches. I just answered the question. And after 12 months of ridiculous hot matches I also ignore them completely. Most of mine are for matches already in my tree and from people I have already contacted.

I take your point as valid. It will be for the individual to gauge the value of the feature.

Thanks have just deleted a few pages, by deleting one then waiting till the next one shows then delete,

thanks Annabel

Surely deleting the lot in one go without checking them rather defeats the object. How do you know that you haven't deleted the very gem you have been looking for?

Annabel. Sylvia is correct there does not seem to be a bulk delete. However you do not have to open and view each hot match to get rid of it. I have tested this out. Open one of the hot matches to view. At the top of the screen you will see the next and previous buttons and a discard match button.

If you keep clicking on the "discard match" button the matches are deleted one after another. Just give the next one a split second to get into line and then zap.

OK so it's not that much faster but I managed to whoosh off a pile of them in a couple of minutes.

Drats. I went back and practised it again and now I've none left. By the way untick the hot matches box in your account settings.

one by one I'm afraid, so far as I can see



that's why mine are all sitting there!



I think they are kept on GR's computers, not mine ...... so they're not taking up any space on my hard drive!




sylvia

Can any one tell me how to delete 43 pages of hot matches in one go, have done over 30 pages can not spend more time on them driving me round the bend, they piled up while away, do I just ignore.

cheers Annabel