Genealogy Chat

I have to say that I have had quite a few matches. granted they are not in the direct line but all have been interesting, especially those in my husband's tree. i would not like them to suspend the service. i usually get 4 or 5 pages. strangely Merry, I have Allens in my tree and have had very few matches. I quite like trawling through them, and there is always the anticipation that one day there will be the important one. Ann Glos

Hot Matches? What are they? I had about 3 pages when they were first introduced. Deleted them all as none were relevant and have not had any more since. I thought the service had already been removed but they had forgoten to remove the link.

I have just gone through another 5 pages of hot matches, mostly for the same person from all corners of Britain, without there being one mildy tepid match to show for my efforts..............no sooner had I finished, when I received a contact from someone hoping they had a match. The person concerned went into quite a bit of detail as to the difficulties they were having trying to locate a certain family member, and I really felt for them. It transpired that not only could I not be of any help to this person, but, the name he was after DID NOT EXIST IN MY TREE!!!! Jen

I rarely look at my Hot Matches - mainly because it involves too much clicking. In my opinion, there is too much clicking on all of GenesReU. As someone previously mentioned, being taken back to the first page, be it in Hot Matches or messages, is a real pain and time consuming - and doesnt it also slow down the site?

I did an interesting little exercise last night. Someone asked how many pages of ignored matches I have and I went to look. I have 99 pages of ignored matches. Because I have never looked at my ignored matches before, I did not realise that they are rankedby number of matches, as they are when you get them, but when you 'ignore' them, they accumulate to the Hot Matcher (am I making sense?) So, my top Hot Matcher on my ignored matches, had 101 matches to names in my tree - I opened it, to see....the same name, 101 times! Pretty useful, eh? OC

HOT MATCHES (my view!) Some matches are very hot but the majority are very COLD! I wouldn't like to see hot matches removed, but definately GR needs to think about improving it, for the clients benefit!! I have been a registered member of GR for 3yrs & have now increased my tree to 2022 people.(with the help from lots of lovely members on this site). I download from GR regularly (just to ensure my tree remains safely kept elsewhere) but have only UPLOADED my tree to GR only once or twice. The current fortnightly dispatch of hot matches- sent me 6 more pages to view . I have 42 pages of Ignored hot matches (which cannot be DELETED, only ignored!) So I ask why am I still only getting names up to the letter B??? answer---because GR only upload the first 200 matches!!! What about giving us the clients an option each month to choose which letter of the alphabet we would like hot matches to search for!!! ????? I also don't like the way the page reverts page to P1 when you tick the ignore/delete box. Karenx

I agree - i think the way forward is for the G.R team to at least get the County a match, this would cut a lot of the cold matches out and save heaps of time. I confess i do look forward to receiving the matches, i have 370 people in my tree, and do receive 'hot matches' from all kinds of different countys that dont match. Im sure the G.R team can change there search engine appropriately.

Hi everyone, To all those people who do not want to receive HOT MATCHES, just go to your account details, and you are given the choice wether or not you want them sent you, how easy peasy. Ben.

While I agree to some of what is said about the hot matches especially the not able to delete once and for all the ones you don't want. I'd like to be able to organise the ones I do want. Not everyone knows the county of their relatives, but a county match would be at least of some use. While I know many of you would prefer to recieve the hot matches from those that have more than one match there are many people just starting their trees and research and that one match might open a floodgate. I know I recently found a single match to be a hit, giving me my dads second cousin and my third. Gypsyjoe

Hi All, I find it fascinating to read posts on Hot Matches, as they drive me so crazy. I cannot understand how some people get more matches than me. I regularly get 4 pages, no more, no less. However, I have a John Adams, John Anderson, Elizabeth Anderson & John Brown in my tree & in 1 whole year, I have never Hot matches for any other names, and never have one of these been born in the same country as mine. I have tried discarding matches.....taken note of names before discarding & sure thing, next lot were exactly the same. I tried, 'ignore', on the assumption that this would stop these ones showing, but no....next time they are there again. I now have 27 pages of names in my ignored matches, all showing 15 matches & if I click on any one of them, the 15 are all the same person!! I emailed GR about this and their response was that Hot Matches picks up just the first 200 matches. Maybe they could rotate that to the 2nd, 3rd etc 200 and then they may, just may be of some use. I would love to get down to the W names which are my brickwalls. In the meantime, I will just ignore them all completely. I am sure that if the do improve the system, then I will see something about it on the board. Blessing. Lyn

I think HOT MATCHES could be improved, i.e. match name, date and place of birth. Then perhaps they would be usefull, instead of endless non matches, which takes forever to check, but you check, just in case............

i think that it could be improved, but from my 3 pages yesterday i had three good links and two replied today to my messages, so it is still helping me

I have about 300 0n my tree and get about 6 pages of hot matches but have not got past names beginnig with E (wold love to here from some Scrivens). I have sent messages to people with definate links to my tree but have not heard back from many and the ones i get messages from usually have one rather dodgey link. I am not certain of some of the birth years on my tree, it wuold help if they were sorted some how by county as well Caroline

Hi Dea It seems to me that GR like to give us surprises by initiating a system whereby you have to click on a members name in order to view the match. Like Phoenix I use the New Names Alert or Search for a match myself; I never use Hot Matches, it's usually a waste of time.I have on here now only my direct descendents in order to get a relevant match sometime. Almost all matches I had before were for obscure rellies thro marriage. As Merry suggested the simplest way would be a list of Hot Matches: Name, Date, County and Country with a button to press to contact the member and a delete button to discard it. Simple. Why you have to keep opening everything to be surprised it's a match with someone from Timbuctoo is beyond me. Hope you have luck with this Kat :)

Just had a look - 99 pages of ignored hot matches, lol. OC

I have 24 pages of hot misses. Sometimes I match someone with 4, 5 or 6 names but when I click to see them there's only one name there or the same name repeated 3 times. Really frustrating.

Dea, I think it would be great if GR improved the Hot Matches system, and I have sent them suggestions in the past for possible improvements, but if computer services still work in the way that they did when I worked in computers all those years ago, there is no reason to suspend an existing service in order to work on improvements to it. Development can be done at the same time as the old system is still running! Kate.

I have just checked and I have 56 pages of ignored hot matches. Most of my current hot matches are Smiths !! lol and I have NEVER had a match to any of them in my tree. If I could just have one matching Smith it would make my day. Jean

Debby, At the moment - you ARE a 'lucky girl' - be thankful you do not get inundatedd !! Hopefully, when this is 'up and running' properly, you wil be glad to receive them. Dea x

I have a tree on genes of approx 1500 and my 2 biggest issues with hot matches are: 1 - I can never seen to get anything past BARBER. 2 - Like so many people people have already mentioned - the sheer volume of useless matches. I think matching by year was a good solution to start with, but now that there are so many people on the site - I think its impossible. A possible solution would be to get the relevant county - now that we are filling in drop-down boxes when we add people, wont have to worry about spelling differences and to also show us unknowns to account for old trees etc. If tweaked a little bit, this would be invaluable to us all I am sure, but at the moment, it takes up too much of my time to look through all the BARBERs all the time - especially when I am currently concentrating on another line of my tree.