Is it possible to do a seach on a place name ?

Question

I wanted to see how many and what  profiles are done with people from a certain parish area. Is it possible to search for place names ?

Answer 1

Hi Joann.  I'm not aware of any feature within WikiTree that supports that.  If a category exists for the parish area of interest, you can find all the profiles in that category, but not all profile managers may have added the category.  One thing you might try is using Google -- type site: www.wikitree.com in the search box followed by the search parameter you're looking for (e.g., name of parish).  If there are possible different spellings or name variations, I'm not sure it would find those.  Perhaps someone else will chime in here with a better idea.

Comments

Hi Dennis. That is a brilliant idea actually, and well worth a go 

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Ya hey....it works. Thanks Dennis, I can now forward a couple of photos to my first "victim" 

Answer 2

You can go to the "Find" button at the top of the page and click on "Categories".  Then go down and click on "Regions".  Keep narrowing your categories until you find the location you're looking for.

There may or may not be a category created with the specific area you're looking for.  If there isn't one, you can create one if you like.  If there is one, the profiles in that category are dependent on profile managers categorizing by location so specific locations are far from complete.   Like individual profiles, location categories are a work in progress.

Comments

I'm sorry to say that I find the whole thing with categorisation very complex. I wanted to work with cemeteries and adding photographs, but I just can't grasp how to work things out. So I'm affraid to say that the 1.000's of grave stone photos I have done are all going on findagrave. Which is all good as long as it's free. But I can them one day starting to charge for that site as well as it's a part of the Ancestry group.

When I photograph a whole church cemetery, I could add gravestone photos to any profiles there might be of people burried there. But as it's so awkward to search on here and find those profiles, it is probably not going to happen any time soon.

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Hi Joann.  I agree that the categories can be confusing, but with practice, it becomes easier to use them.  I asked for a mentor when I started out with the cemeteries project, and there's no way I could have made any progress without her help.  But now I've added hundreds of profiles for my local cemetery and others in my state.  Anyway, just saying, after you get the hang of them, categories aren't so bad. But searching by location--that's what I really want, so thanks for asking and getting an answer.

Answer 3

Some search improvements are being worked on right now, and one of those improvements is being able to search by location. The search improvements will probably be finished sometime this month.

Until then, you can search for profiles from a location in the "search" section at http://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm

Comments

That sounds great

If we could search for location of Birth, Marriage, Death etc, it would improve things so much. As for the link you just gave me,- I can see that you can search on location, but that only seem to turn up profiles with issues (dating, records etc), and not normal profiles. Can you explain why that is ?

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The upgraded search will allow for searching for birth and death location, but not marriage.

For the link I gave you, you might have been searching in the "Suggestions"  section. Below the "Analyse" section there is a section called "Search". That lets you do a full-text search, and you can use it to search by location.

The Google method other people mentioned also works pretty well.

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Fab, Thanks. I will try that.

Answer 4

I would try what Dennis suggested :

Use google and search for :

site:wikitree.com/wiki/ XXXX

Where XXXX is the name of the location.

This limits google to only searching WikiTree

Comments

Yes, unless the profiles you are looking for are already categorized in the place, searching from Google is the best way to find profiles for a particular place.