I have an indexing idea, more below.

Question

Many family names are also from the same or nearby locations. In my case the Bruce family are mainly from Essex, UK and the Lock family are from Surrey, UK. Can a new index be created without crashing the site?

Answer 1

On Wikitree+ you can search on the combination of name and location. Searching "Bruce Essex" currently gives a resultset of 63, and "Lock Surrey"  35.

Answer 2

What sort of index are you wanting?  Search by birthplace?  To do that successfully we'd first need to have standardized place names, which so far we don't have on WikiTree.  There are various problelms on getting it done, such as changes of place names over time and different spellings of the same place.  Someday it will probably happen, and once that's done, indexes should be a possibility.

Answer 3

What you can do is use the category system that exists on WikiTree.

I took the liberty of adding a location category to Edward Lock.

Comments

It would be nice if when you add a new person that if there birthplace was a known category the it could be added automatically to that category