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**Mark** · 28 July 2016, 09:52 AM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Hi Sue,

Originally posted by suzivegemite View Post

I use Census Year is 1851 AND Census Place contains Durham, it finds all people who have an entry for the 1851 census and all the people who have ANY Census Place containing the word Durham, not necessarily just for the year 1851.

Are you certain that you're selecting AND as the operator, and not OR? Given the results you're seeing it sounds like you've selected OR as the operator.

Thanks,

**suzivegemite** · 28 July 2016, 05:00 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Hi Mark

I'm certain I have AND selected as the operator. See below screen grabs.

Is there a way to achieve the results I'm looking for?

Thanks

Sue

Attached Files

**AE Palmer** · 28 July 2016, 05:16 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Originally posted by suzivegemite View Post

Hello All

I'm hoping someone can help me using 'Find'.

Using 'Find' is there a way to sort all people who lived in a county for a certain census year.
I can look for all people that have an entry for the Census year 1851, but what I can't seem to do, is find all people who have a Census entry for the year 1851 and for that year ONLY the county was Durham.

// cut //

…or is there a way that I'm not seeing?

Thanks muchly

Sue

As Mark said, make sure that the “connector” is AND, not OR. That and searching for Durham County in the census place field should get you what you want. It is a matter of making the search specific enough to get the wanted material, but not so specific that the search excludes wanted material.

BTW, you are defining your counties as counties — Durham, Durham County, state name, Country vs.: Durham, Durham, state name, Country. If not, it is time to spend time in normalizing your place names to be:
• Street
• Town
• County (with the word County or Parish included)
• State (Provence)
• COUNTRY

For those who are unfamiliar with the term normalization, it is a process of regularizing the order and spelling of words so that the list of places has only one way of expressing any given location! It may seem to be a nuisance at first, but it pays enormous dividends when searching your records.

**suzivegemite** · 28 July 2016, 05:31 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Arnold

Did you look at the screen grabs I posted to see my settings and the results I'm getting?

Sue

**alan** · 28 July 2016, 06:12 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Hi Sue,

If its any consolation, I too am having difficulty in using "Find".

I've selected Census Year > equal > 1871 census

AND

Census Place > contains > Harwell and all I get "There are no matches"

I must be doing something wrong as I have at least 5 censuses for that year in sources (not all being Harwell).

Alan

**ByronSpoon** · 28 July 2016, 07:03 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Originally posted by suzivegemite View Post

...

If I use Census Year is 1851 AND Census Place contains Durham, it finds all people who have an entry for the 1851 census and all the people who have ANY Census Place containing the word Durham, not necessarily just for the year 1851.
...

The only way I can think of is to make an event called 1851 Census and then do the search for 1851 Census place contains Durham, is this correct, or is there a way that I'm not seeing?

Sue

Sue, I have long suffered the same experience as you. Unfortunately this appears to be an undesirable side effect in Reunion when using multiple occurrences for an event.

FIND returns results that match the event (all occurrences of the event get lumped together), and not limiting results to be within the same occurrence of the event for a person.

Sigh, I know of no way to get around this, other than as you suggested in your original post by definng a separate census event for each census year. This is likely not an acceptable workaround for you, and certainly not a workaround that would be acceptable to me.

**Susan Park** · 28 July 2016, 07:13 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

I don't have a solution but I did perform the experiment on my own database and got the desired results. I searched for Residence Year Equals 1930 AND Residence Place Equals Stanislaus. The resulting list was for 20 or so people who lived in Stanislaus County in 1930.

Something is definitely wrong at Sue's place because of the eight items returned in her search only one even contained the required word "Durham," and it doesn't even line up with the other criteria of 1851.

Is this a case where one needs to rebuild the cache files? I've never had a need to do that. Other than turning everything off and restarting what could be the answer? By the way, I chose several other years and locations in my testing and all worked as expected.

**Susan Park** · 28 July 2016, 07:21 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

I have to take it back! I went to look at my list and *almost* everyone on it was in Stanislaus County in 1930 but I found a couple who were not in Stanislaus County in 1930 but they had been in 1920.

So there is a glitch somewhere. My list of finds seems to have had a higher success rate than Sue's but it's not 100% so the list of matches isn't as useful as I thought.

**ByronSpoon** · 28 July 2016, 07:29 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Originally posted by Susan Park View Post

I have to take it back! I went to look at my list and *almost* everyone on it was in Stanislaus County in 1930 but I found a couple who were not in Stanislaus County in 1930 but they had been in 1920.

So there is a glitch somewhere. My list of finds seems to have had a higher success rate than Sue's but it's not 100% so the list of matches isn't as useful as I thought.

Yes Susan Park, as I stated in my earlier post to the O.P., Suzivegimite, extra results are returned because:
“FIND returns results that match the event (all occurrences of the event get lumped together), and not limiting results to be within the same occurrence of the event for a person.”
Well at least I'm happy that you double-checked your results further, sparing me the trouble of chasing down a rabbit hole.

**Susan Park** · 29 July 2016, 12:04 AM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Is this an acceptable alternative? I did a Find on County name only. Find Residence Place contains Stanislaus. No other criteria. It returned 53 instances.

Then I clicked on the 2 orange rectangles at the bottom (List Window) and deleted the birth date and place columns, replaced them with Residence Place and Residence Year.

Then I did a manual sort with Residence Year as primary sort and Residence Place secondary. That gave me all my 1930s together and I could see all the Stanislaus County people were together in a bunch. Of course it was sorted by City first since that's the way my place are organized, but within the 1930 grouping there were only 14 in Stanislaus County. They were easy to see.

It *seems* like a decent workaround. What did I miss?

**suzivegemite** · 29 July 2016, 03:00 AM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Hi Susan

I used the criteria you suggested and I can MAKE it work, but I didn't get the results I expected and its not really satisfactory for my needs.

My search criteria was:

Census is 1851
AND
Census place contains Durham.

I got 35 results. I went to List View as you suggested and entered these sorting columns
Surname
First & Middle Name
Census Date
Census Place

Of the 35 results only 12 were for the 1851 census. 11 contained the word Durham and 1 did not. So far, so good.
The other results were for 1841 and 18 contained the word Durham, 5 did not!!
This really bothers me, as there shouldn't be 5 results that don't fit any of the 'Find' parameters.

So yes, I can sort the list columns for all the 1851 entries and I can pick out the ones that aren't Durham, but when 'Find' is giving results that don't fit any parameters how in the heck do I trust the results at all!

When conducting a One Name Study its all about cross referencing. So say I pull a list from one of the sites I subscribe to, on all the people with my chosen surname, living in Durham, from 1851 census and enter it into a spread sheet, I want to be able to add their corresponding Reunion Person ID Number to the spreadsheet so I can be sure they are all accounted for.

I have only recently started my One Name Study so numbers are relatively small but this scenario won't work once the numbers get into the tens of thousands.
It would be great if Reunion could bring up a list of people who's 1851 census entry contains the word Durham. Ho hum, back to the drawing board.

Thanks for trying though, its appreciated.

Sue

**Kim** · 29 July 2016, 01:49 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

I had the same experience and came to the same conclusion at Byron. If I search for Census Year contains 1920 AND Census Place contains Boston, I will get everyone in my database who has a census record for 1920 AND was listed in ANY census as living in Boston. There seems to be no way to connect the year with the place.

At one time I has created separate events for each census, which would help for this, but I found that for other reasons, I really preferred to just use the general census event.

**AE Palmer** · 29 July 2016, 05:39 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Originally posted by suzivegemite View Post

Arnold

Did you look at the screen grabs I posted to see my settings and the results I'm getting?

Sue

I did. After I had posted my comment.

That said there may be another approach that will work. It is more convoluted, but forces the issue at hand. Do a simple find on the 1851 census. Once found, MARK them. Now do a compound search for those marked records and for the county in question. This process of using only the marked records precludes any other census years.

HTH.

**Dennis J. Cunniff** · 29 July 2016, 07:55 PM

Re: Using 'Find' to locate place and year of event

Originally posted by AE Palmer View Post

This process of using only the marked records precludes any other census years.

It may narrow down the possibilities, but consider a person with the two following census events:

1841 Durham
1851 Syracuse

He'll be found, but he doesn't meet the wanted criteria.

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