This is a minor observation on the operation of advanced search and criterion groups which I hope may be of small interest to others.
I have for some time wanted to be able to distinguish between criteria for a single event and those for a single type of event. I think that this is now possible.
For example, using RM10, my recollection is that I could search for people with a residence event dated 1926 and with a residence event located in Ireland, but that I couldn’t narrow that search to contain only the people who had a single residence event which was both dated 1926 and with a residence in Ireland. It seems to me that the new individual event rules do focus on a single event in this way.
To test this, I searched on my main tree (>67,000 people) for
A single criterion: residence event, date contains 1911 and place contains Ireland. This produced 2283 results (probably all for people with an event for the Irish census of that year.)
Two distinct criteria: i) residence event, date contains 1911 AND ii) residence event place contains Ireland. This produced rather more results at 2506 (presumably including people resident in Ireland at some time, but who where present in England, Scotland, Wales or Canada for the census of that year.)
Three distinct criteria: i) residence event, date contains 1911 AND ii) residence event place contains Ireland BUT NOT residence event, date contains 1911 and place contains Ireland. This produced 223 results, pleasingly the difference between the first two numbers, and the people in the list were as imagined above.
So in summary, this aspect of the advanced search now gives me the flexibility and precision that I want.
You are correct. This functionality was requested for years, really for decades, and it came into being with the improvements to Advanced Search in RM11.
My favorite example was that I wanted to be able to search for individuals who had an 1850 census fact in Texas. As simple of a search as that sounds, it wasn’t possible until RM11, and now it works a charm.
As a small update, I came across a search that I could not do, despite the improved advanced search functionality.
I wanted to search for all people with an event whose place included ‘British Columbia’ but did not include ‘Canada’. I don’t think that advanced search allows you to do this, because, although you can add multiple criteria for different aspects of the event (date = x and place details contain y) you can only have one criterion for each aspect. And if you use the AND operator to add a second condition, it will cover all events attached to the people concerned. (ie I would find all people with at least one event place containing ‘British Columbia’ and at least one event place not containing ‘Canada’.)
Another option would have been to select people with events containing places which end in ‘British Columbia’. However, this is an option which I have previously asked for but which has yet to be implemented.
Not a perfect solution, but Any Fact Type → Place → Equals → British Columbia is likely to come close.
Another imperfect solution that is likely to come close is to filter the Place List by British Columbia. Then eyeball the ones that don’t include Canada and then click on Used. And for that matter, you could fix them en masse from there. Just edit the ones that are missing Canada, fix them, and merge them as needed. And for that matter, you could merge the ones “with Canada” with the ones “without Canada” automatically getting rid of the ones “without Canada”. You wouldn’t even have to fix the bad ones. You could just merge them out of existence.
I need to create a group, so that I can reflect the changes made in RM back to Ancestry.
Place name = British Columbia would not do it, because I have Victoria, British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Burnaby, British Columbia etc.
I could create a group with place name= British Columbia OR place name = Victoria, British Columbia OR etc, etc, but I am too lazy for that.
In the end I created a group place name contains British Columbia, getting about ten times the number of results that I wanted and browsed through them in Treeshare, updating Ancestry with all the places that differed.
Despite all the improvements in RM11, the Advanced Search feature does not support the wild card search feature that is available in the search boxes. This would be a nice additional feature for Advanced Search.
RM11 now supports several different criteria for the same fact as long as the different criteria are for different parts of the fact. For example, you can now search for a Residence fact in 1950 in Canada and the two criteria can be applied to the same fact. That was not possible before RM11.
Even after RM11, it’s still not possible to search with more than one criteria for the same fact if the criteria are for the same part of the fact, such as place. Therefore, a search for “place contains British Columbia” but not “place contains British Columbia, Canada” is not going to produce the expected results. Such a search will complete without complaint and it will produce results. But the results may not be the expected results. That’s because the two different criteria can be applied to two different facts rather than to the same fact. This is the same problem that bedeviled all of Advanced Search prior to RM11. But it seems to me that it’s still a limitation if you need more than one criterion to be applied to the same part of one fact. This is the problem being addressed by AlanWatson.
I was about to post that you could get the desired result utilizing “BUT NOT” to evaluate the criteria a second time. So for example, “to search for all people with an event whose place included ‘British Columbia’ but did not include ‘Canada’.”
Mark by Event Any Fact type where place contains “British Columbia”
BUT NOT Any Fact type where place contains “, Canada”
or the BUT NOT statement could be Any Fact type where place contains “British Columbia,”
However in testing I realized that BUT NOT removes the person as soon as they meet the criteria, even if they have another event that meets the initial criteria. So the above query would not work for any person who has multiple facts where one place is “British Columbia, Canada” and another event place is “Vancouver, British Columbia”.
Full Boolean logic does not exist unless you do queries using SQLite But using SQLite requires programming skills and knowledge of the RM database schema. In addition, it can be dangerous, it is not supported by RM, and RM strongly recommends against users running SQLite queries.
That being said, I do run SQLite queries from time to time. But I do so very reluctantly, and only after all the possibilities for running queries from within RM itself have been exhausted. Through the years, improvements in RM have made it less necessary for me to run SQLite queries, but I still run into situations where it seems that nothing else will do. It seldom happens anymore, but it does still happen occasionally.
