By popular customer demand, we have made the following changes to the Search function:
- added the ability to specify a spouse’s first name during a marriage search, in combination with First Name, Last Name, or both. This should help narrow down the list of results for people searching common names. For example, you can now search for:
- Alice Smith who married a George
- George Wanless who married an Alice
- any George to any Alice (this returns many results, so can be slow, but is useful if you have unusual first names and a hard-to-read surname)
- any groom surname with any bride first name, or any bride surname with any groom first name
- The new Spouse field is at the bottom of the Parish Record Options section of the Search form. This field is ignored during searches of all other records - it is only applied to Marriages and Marriage Bonds.
- under Display Options on the Search form, you can now sort your results by First Name, Birth Year, or Event Year. Previously, the second choice was “Year of Birth/Event”, which produced a confusing mixture of results, with some sorted by event year and some by birth year. Now, if you sort by Birth Year, your results are truly sorted by birth year if it is contained in the record and by Event Year only if it is not. Likewise, sorting by Event Year gives you the events in proper year order, no matter when the people were born.
- added Cemetery Records and Marriage Bonds as options to the Search In drop-down list. This allows you to search either the Cemetery Records or Marriage Bonds separately, without seeing results from the church burial register or marriage register. Searching in Burials will still include both burial register and cemetery records in the results, and searching in Marriages will include both marriage register entries and marriage bonds in the results, all marked appropriately so you can tell the difference.
- added Guisborough to the District list on the Search form so you can now limit your search to records in the Guisborough district
- rearranged the Search form so that Parish Record options come before Census Options, as more people seem to be using the parish record searches. Also rearranged the order of fields within the Parish Record options.
As usual, please let me know if I broke anything by adding the new code, or let me know if you like it or if it needs to be improved somehow.