When will the "exclusions" on "Find Ancestor Matches" actually work?

Question

When searching for matches, I usually restrict dates to +/-  2 years. I ALWAYS exclude allowing for century typos. I believe the individual records for birth are separated from death in all cases, so the program should be able to distinguish between people born in 1870 from those who died in 1870. On many searches, I seem to be getting a lot suggested matches of people born a century or more after my relative died.

Once this is working, I would love to see some way to restrict the LOCATION searched. When I search on a relative who was born, lived, and died in Texas, I may get two matches from Lancashire, one from Wales, one from Maine, and one from Alabama (and none from Texas).

Answer 1

Hi Jerry,

Maybe you saw this post from yesterday: http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/4052/questionable-result-on-search-for-matches

Could it be something like this? If not, give your example and we'll try to figure out what's happening. If there's a bug we need to fix we want to know about it.

Regarding limiting by place, this will be difficult. We don't "normalize" locations, i.e. force everyone to select from a pre-set array of towns, counties, states, countries, etc., or later try to somehow change them to expected location options. This makes it very hard for a simple search engine like ours to do matching. Google might know that Alabama is in the US, aka USA, aka United States, etc., and that Wales is part of the UK, or GB, aka Britain, etc., etc., but our FindMatches code doesn't.