Genealogy Chat

I think you are being very unfair about a facility that was introduced to try and help looking for possible matches to your tree. You need to think carefully about what you want fixing. At the moment, the Names Matching checks name and date of birth. It is no use just complaining that it is broke, as it aint , it is 'doing what it says on the tin' Just hard luck is your names are Brown, Jones or Smith. If we want to see some improvements and modifications, as I am sure we all do, then we have to make some sensible suggestions to GR as to what these might be. I suppose what a lot of us would like to see is some additional matching such as on place of birth. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds as somehow you have to deal with variations in spelling and formatting. For example, you as a human looking at West Brom, Staffordshire and West Bromwich Staffs are one and the same, but to program a computer to arive at the same conclusion, and all the other millions of different variations that could possible come up, gets rather complicated. So come on - constructive criticism please....!

Entirely agree I am the unlucky descendant of two Henry Brown's and various other Browns - all from London and I even get hot matches from Australia! I did complain some time ago asking that at least birthplaces could be matched, no reply. Maybe we ought to bombard the 'contact us' link with comlaints? Sylvie

Im dreading my next lot, Ive had 6 pages of Ann Unknowns and now they are working through the alphabet and Ive had 6 pages of Mary Unknowns. I keep writing to them telling them to put the name of the 'hot match' instead of the contact and that would let us delete all the obviously useless ones immediately without the fag of opening each one in hope.

You delete the John Smiths you just get more thats how it happens for me. I wouldn't mind but as you say year and birthplace not the same who needs that- not me don't even bother anymore unless someone has more than 2 matches even then the person has just entered the name in their tree more than once LOL Zoe

I deleted a lot of mine after going through pages of them. then they all came back lol Marion

What is the point in being sent 100's of supposed hot matches,when all they rely on is the name- ??Yes they will send ones that are the same in every way-but if I have put JOHN SMITH born in LIVRERPOOL,why am I getting every ruddy john Smith from evry town,county,country ,known to man-an absolute idiotic filtering system,that is totally amateurish and time consuming-in amongst the 20 or so pages there may well be a good one,but why should I bother wading through them all ,deleting each one as I go??