Is Ancestry broken?

[kenspeckle]

I cant get ANY results from all searches on census today I have reported to ancestry I reckon possibly as they are doing a new way of searching that they may have stuffed something up most annoying as I am hot on the trail of a couple grr

[hg]

Is there anybody who is familiar with using Ancestry able to tell me why there are no death index for oct-dec for the years 1940, 1942 1nd 1943? Surely this can't be right! Sorry if this has nothing to do with this post.

thanks

Helen

[LesleyB]

Hi Helen

to tell me why there are no death index for oct-dec for the years 1940, 1942 1nd 1943?

Just a guess, but could it be something to do with WW2 being in full swing at the time and therefore resources being deployed elsewhere, just as there is no 1941 census of the UK.

Best wishes
Lesley

[AndrewP]

Is there anybody who is familiar with using Ancestry able to tell me why there are no death index for oct-dec for the years 1940, 1942 1nd 1943? Surely this can't be right! Sorry if this has nothing to do with this post.

Hi Helen,

I have occasionaly found in these indexes that a particular quarter year doesn't appear in a search. Instead of searching by name, if you search by year, then quarter, then alphabet, then page you should find the result(s), but it can take a fair bit of time to find the right page. It seems to be an indexing issue on their part.

All the best,

AndrewP

[kenspeckle]

Hi Helen there is death indexes for those years find under
England & Wales, Death Index: 1837-1983 you will see a full list of the index years
regards Lesley in Tassie

[emanday]

Hi Helen,

I've noticed lately that successful previous searches suddenly fail to get any results then, sometimes only hours sometimes days later, there they are again.

Maybe the Ancestry IT folk take sections of index databases out while they run updates or the like.

I know it was something I used to have to do sometimes when updating either certain types of data or programming, but we only ever pre-warned users if the "outage" was likely to be for very long or for a large section of the data.

[ninatoo]

I am trying to search the Scottish censuses and it tells me it has results but when I click on the link it says there were no results. Frustrating!

[hg]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my query regarding the quarterly death indexes on ancestry. I tried Andrew's tip but kept getting a message saying I need to input the name so I contacted Ancestry, this is the reply I receved.

'These Quarters are available. Let me show you the 'long' way to these records:

* from the HOME page of Ancestry.co.uk, click the link 'Birth Marriage & Death' in the Ancestry Quick Links
* click on 'England & Wales, Death Index: 1837-1983' under the heading 'Death'
* DO NOT enter details here, INSTEAD scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on '1940'
* click on 'Q4-Cot-Nov-Dec'
* click on the first letter of the surname
* this brings up the entire book of that letter from this quarter. You are on page '1' of the book
* manually change the 'image number' to find the name alphabetically

If you scroll down to the very bottom of this page, you may see that there are some names handwritten in. If so ,they are alphabetically out of order, but when this page was indexed into our system, the handwritten name was listed as the last name on this page. This caused our searching system to not recognize all names as belonging to this page because if they fall alphabetically AFTER the handwritten name.

We realize this is a problem and are working on fixing it. It is a lengthy time consuming problem. Thank you for your patience.'

I'm off to have a wee look now.

all the best

Helen