Genealogy Chat

hello is this a record four pages of hot natches of the same name william ball from all over the

world and not one matches sally

thank goodness jonesey i haven,t
sally

16 pages of hotmatches have just persuaded me to change two of my surnames. I now have XSmith and XBrown's in my tree.

I await my next batch with baited breath to see if I actually get any matches with the other names on my tree.

Well I have several William Ball's


1780
1820
1882
1910
1847

and John Smith

1701
1821
1821
1845
1830
1821
1852
1938
1870
1878


Am I a hot match?

Have just spent ages clearing out the latest anything but Hot Matches. The most ridiculous "match" was for someone in my tree name of Wolf, born in the 1770's. The match was Evans, born in the year 0.

Oddly, there are numerous Smiths in my tree - to date, not one Hot Match. Hope I am not tempting fate.

Karen
Know what you mean about replies, but there are some on here who to me at least have been incredibly helpful.
With out there help would be still very much be in the dark regarding aspects of my extended family.
As pretty much a beginner in this, its been a terrific site so far and would in my view be a shame if it changed to be just a site for tips or a place for others to do research for you, without the contact part of it.

Sorry to burst anyones bubble but I've just checked my supposedly 'hot matches' and your not going to believe how many pages I've got, but it's the truth 71. Yep 71 and No it's not that I don't go through them regularily either. I haven't even got my full tree on here because I kept getting so many 'hot matches' I removed lots of my tree to stop them coming up.

I go through them on a regular basis & delete thembut they still seem to come back it's so frustrating. But I still wouldn't stop being a member as it's a great site.

Lou

I can't see the point of deleting your tree so that you don't get Hot Matches. Doesn't this defeat the object of having your tree on here in the first place? A bit like cutting off your foot because your toenails keep growing.

It also causes the sort of mismatch that the Major describes, at least until the program runs again and all the indexes get rebuilt.

Hot Matches are not compulsory, you don't have to look at them if you don't want to. Incidentally you can not delete them either. You can however choose to put them in the 'Ignore' pile, or not as the mood takes you.

I do most of my name searching manually, but every now and again something pops up in Hot Matches which I haven't seen before. so at least for me, they have their use.

This is surely a system issue, if the names and birthyear can be matched then surely it can be set so that at least one word of the birthplace also matches. Then we would get mostly real Hot Matches, and at only about 1% of the current level! I wanted to contact Genes Reunited directly about this and have their opinion, but they dont seem to have a "suggestions box"? At present I get about 5 pages of matches per fortnight - it takes about 1/2 hour to go through them all looking for the 0 or 1 match that is relevant - depending on the syste, speed, which is often very slow as I suspect a lot of other people are doing the same thing. How inefficient is that???

Keith,

It is actually quite hard to do, and uses a huge amount of computing resource when you start trying to match strings of words.

I was involved in a name and address matching program with a major High Street bank a few years ago. The Project Manager, still wet behind the ears from school thought it would be a doddle to match addresses, despite the warnings given by several people who had been involved with this sort of work before.

In order not to miss anything, In the end they had to settle for reporting everything which had at least one address word / string matching, leaving it to the user to determine manually whether or not there was a real match. In most cases there wasn't

Shades of Hot Matches.....? and that was after spending several million £ on the project.

So, in a way I can sympathize with GR being reluctant to add place names in the matching criteria, it is probably more trouble and cost than it is worth.

I find hot matches quite useful and look forward to receiving them.
Go to "My account" and you can turn them off.
I have received two member queries from there today and one of them is HOT.

Sorry, I mean to say ignor not delete, my mistake. The reason I don't put all my tree on here is because there were far too many hot matches as explained. Just because I chose to do so doesn't mean I can't find a connection.

With 730 people in my tree now on this site & I get 71 pages of f hot matches, I can't imagine how many I would get if I put in my full tree! Hence the reason I don't put it on, it's my choice.

Lou

Jim, thanks for the info about turning them off. it's a great tip, thanks.

i thought i had better come back
i am not haveing a go at hot matches i reguley use them and had some very good info from them

jus this time had so many of one name

sally

Just got an email from GR re Hot Matches


Elizabeth ? appears in 304 trees on Genes Reunited.
Here's just one of your possible matches...




:))))))))))))))))




sylvia

I too get lots of matches but never any for the ones with the surname of Smith - yet I have at least a dozen of those, and many others I never get a match with anyone :-(

I appreciate the comments about the difficulty with place names, but couldn't it even recognise a country? For instance if I am looking at a Bill Brown b 1895 in Inverness Scotland, he is not going to match with a person by the same name born in New Zealand.

I don't mind the hot matches but I don't seem to get as many enquiries from people that match to me, it seems to be I am the one sending messages. Still sometimes maybe the a single match is enough to crack a mystery!

My problem with Hot Matches is that the search facility on my tree does not function, so if there is a possible match I have to look at my tree elsewhere for comparison.

The problem disappears when all the Hot Matches are discarded.

it isn't the matching of John Smith of Inverness Scotland with John Smith Inverness elsewhere that bothers me



it's the matching of Jonathan Greysmith of Oldham, Lancashire with John Greysmith of Bolton, Lancashire

or Jonathan Greysmith with Robert Jones

I completely fail to see the connection!!



sylvia

Hi Elizabeth,

True there are places named the same, but if it could recoginse a country it would be good and that functionality should be easy to format I would think.

Sylvia, yes I agree with you, especially when the names are not the same.

Actually it would be good if Hot Matches recognise the middle name/s also that would limit the amount of incorrect matches somewhat.

I think the concept of matching is good, but it needs to be a bit more refined (just my opinion anyway!).