Genealogy Chat

Does anyone else get irritated at the pointlessness of some hot matches they are provided with?

How can their possibly be any match between two people who share a name and birth year but were born on different continents?

I imagine a lot of people simply ignore their list, but I have found some useful contacts through mine so I do tend to check through it at intervals.

I don't mind if matches with the same name and birth date but no place of birth come up, (though I won't bother to get in touch) but it is really irritating when people with no possible connection are matched. Even when I delete them there they are back next time. Its all a horrible waste of time scrolling through this rubbish. Could place of birth as well as name not be matched to reduce these mismatches, or at least be offered as an optional filter?

Pamela

Dear Pamela

I agree - I get loads of matches with Australian birthplaces for Lancs and Hants relatives - it drives me daft!!

Also it always seems to be the same person - one on the fringes of my tree rather than someone I'm more closely linked to.

Saying that - I have had one or two really good ones.

I agree matching places of birth etc,. would make the system work much better.

Best wishes

Maria

I agree it is frustrating, but that's the way it works at present. Here is what GR say on the subject.

"Why don't you match the place with Hot Matches?

At the moment we just match the name and year of birth. However, we may make changes to the way system works in the future and add in the place of birth as a match. The problem is that members add the place in different way, or it can be mis-spelt. Some might add the town, others the full address. This makes it difficult to match. By keeping the search broad we feel you have a greater chance of a match. "

If the computer did it all it would take a lot of the fun out don't you think?
I only joined genes a week ago and already I have found my grandmother's sister's grandaughter and got details back to 1599 on her line. All through hot matches....and made a lifelong friend I hope...Liz.

Peter,

I can understand it isnt straight forward, but there must be some effective way of filtering. People with a John Smith in their trees must be having a terrible time. My own bugbear is Willam Watson, the sibling of an ancestor, who produces loads of matches which would be interesting but pretty irrelevant even if exact. There must be some probability formula that these clever computing people could apply where there are large numbers of a common name. Or what about at least a means of blocking the repetition of the same matches time after time we once you havedeleted them. There used to be a `dont show this match again' option, not that it worked. If repeats could be blocked from your list after you had checked them out the first time they appeared that would help a lot.

I had one that seemed wrong BUT it was actually the place of birth guessed at that was wrong and the links were correct, so not all of the hot matches are wrong because the places of birth are on different contacts.

I'd made a guess that an ancestor was born in Australia because hubby and children were BUT she was actually from Cornwall! Actually saved me having to try and check the info as someone else provided me with the wherewithal to get further back, so I'm quite grateful for the mismatch.

I'm not so grateful when the hot matches come up with totally different names!!!

Su

Elizabeth,

when you have been a member for a year or so and get the same mismatches suggested at regularly repeated intervals you will be fed up too.

At one point I had 36 pages of hot matches, which weeded down to 6 I wanted to keep. I would rather have spent time checking out the interesting ones, but I was too fed up by the time I had spent a couple of hours discarding the dross.

Susan,

I have no problem with people taking long shots, and finding matches and making new contacts is the whole point of GU.

I agree some of the matches created are completely weird and off the wall as well as the simply irritating ones that are not quite the same enough.

I'd happliy wade through 100 pages of hot matches for one gem. (and I have been a member for more than a year.)

The don't show this match again option does work, I use it all the time. Currently I have around 18 pages of matches that I keep in view and have had contact with the respective members, and around 10 pages of 'discarded' names which I am not interested in.

Discarding matches doesn't remove them altogether, but just hides this member away from view. It is the member that is hidden away, not the underlying name.So, there isn't for example, any way of removing 'John Smith' from the search routine.

Occasionally, the system reports a match but when you look at it, it is for a different person altogether. This apparently can happen if the other member has uploaded a new gedcom in the period that the match was last run and you looking at it. It usually sorts itself out in time, but if not, GR can fix it if you report it to them.

At the end of the day, if Hot Matches are not your cup of tea, then don't bother with them. Personally I do find them useful on occasion even though I tend to do most of my searching manually.

Peter,

I do find them useful that is what is so irritating, having to waste time sifting out irrelevant ones time after time. And yes there are generally completely incomprehensible ones, not occasionally.

Maybe I dont know how to operate the system successfully, but I can assure you that after I have deleted a match, there it is back again next time the hot match cycle is run, sitting there with a new label against it needing to be deleted all over again.

I would just like to maybe save the relevant ones to a separate folder, and have the discards discarded permanently. I don't think that is a too much to wish for or that it should be too complicated to achieve.

Pamela

Pamela,

I don't have the problem you describe and once discarded, that member stays discarded unless I switch it back to current matches. Future HotMatch updates don't bring the member back to current.

When you discard a match are you saving the result by clicking on the "Discard Selection" link?

Peter,

Yes I do but still they come back. I think every time someone modifies their family by adding or editing something the files go into the new records pot, and then all the old previously discarded hot matches come back as new ones and have to be discarded again. I even get as new contacts people I have been in touch with for ages that are not new at all and already on my list as well

Pamela

I think it is every time someone uploads a modified Gedcom they appear as a new contact. One of my matches appears three time with differing numbers of matches.

I've just deleted 35 pages of matches. I hope that if one of them shows up as having two people common to my tree I will take a look.

I have looked through a similar number of matches before and found I had 600+ William/Elizabeth Smith and Margaret Brown born anywhere but where mine came from.

I still have half a page of matches who are definate relations. (Luckily most of my lot had unusual surnames)

My problem is the hot matches given to me every time someone has an 'unknown' I have 'unknowns' in mine further back as does probably everyone. But I am not related to everyone elses 'unknowns', nor they to mine. Does anyone else get this problem. I suspect perhaps I should not have put 'unknown' where I don't know - if anyone can make sense of this, well done. I also get loads of repeats, including 'unknown' repeats - I think I'll just get a nice gin and tonic now, and go and find a 'happy place' ............
Eileen

yep its a tuf 1 and irritating however I have found great matches and contacts through hot matches so am happy to put up with it...despite being matched with myself and born on the other side of the world lol
On a serious note some places of birth may well be a guess and turn out to be a match. Who knows?
I for 1 have a reli who could of been born in England or Ireland so would want matches from both locations.
By the way is there any way to get rid of the dicarded matches for good once in the discarded list?

I get hot matches where nothing matches at all, years, names and countries of birth all different and still thay are classed as 'hot matches'

Lesley/Suzanne

Don't give up hope yet. It took me just over 2 years to get a fantastic hot match. This person provided me with a newspaper clipping of my great grandad (with photo) and his obituary in WW1. The first time I have had anything on my own ancestors although I have had good links with people researching siblings.

I would happily wade through thousands of hot matches to get another link like that. As others have said some people don't know where an ancestor was born and others have an educated guess. I get countless Lloyds born in Wales where as my lot are from Shropshire.

The suggestion that a member uploading a new gedcom triggering a new set of matches, sound plausible, when you think of it. You never know, the new file might have a real match in it.

In answer to the question re discarding for good, no you can't. All you can do is to split matches into two categories. Current Hot Matches and Ignored Hot Matches.

Thanks for all the feedback, glad it isnt just me and other people have the same problems. It seems to me there could be some simple system solutions to these problems.
1) there is clearly a glytch with throws up complete mismatches which needs fixing.

2) It would be good if there was a way to save favourite hot matches separately from the new ones, and

3) some way of permanently tagging the deleted ones so they don't keep coming back into your hot match list afterwards.

Is this too much to hope for do yo think?

Pamela