Ancestry.com ? naff for shipping and immigration records

[kiwikid]

I put all relevant details into Ancestry yet they keep on coming up with irrelevant dates and persons. Am I doing something wrong or is there a better website? eg Henry Alexander Meredith from Dublin dob 1880 traveled to NZ in early 1900's?

[AndrewA]

Do you have "Exact Only" boxes checked? with names do you have exact only with any of the options selected? If you select similar spelling or initials, then you will get quite a few results returned, phonetic will produced even more.

One annoying bug with ancestry, is that when you edit your search, the Exact Only checkboxes can often be left off.

Do you know for sure that this person travelled direct to New Zealand? No detour to AMerica or Australia?

[kiwikid]

I dont know if he went directly to NZ or via NY or Quebec. Thanks for the hints. I am trying to decide whether to buy ancestry or FMP sub

[AndrewA]

Personally I prefer Ancestry, I know a lot of people get put off becuase of exactly the same problems you are experiencing. Its a fallacy to think that you just enter a name and date and you get it!

did you see my thread on "candidate for the worst transcription page?" There could be many reasons why a record is not found, by the time data gets online it could have been copied numerous times, each time mistake being possilbe.

Another useful thing to use are wildcards. use a ? for any letter or * for any string of letters, so for someone called William whos name is easily mis-spelt or variants of, us something like Wi*m or if transcribers are continuing miss-spelling a family surname , such as Hayes as Hages, then just use ? Ha?es etc

[kiwikid]

Thanks for the tips. Yes I did see your post.J