September 29th, 2016

The new Scotland's People website launched yesterday, and there are some great new features (we'll be writing more about them shortly), and most importantly, some extremely useful new record sets. Eventually it will be a major improvement on the old version, but we've had some misadventures when searching. So far we've found what appear to be four different bugs in the search engine:

• The date filters for at least some of the new baptismal registers weren't working last night (see here). To give them credit, their twitter person promised to look into this today.
• The allocation of some districts to counties isn't working properly (Angus and Forfarshire are effectively the same county) - see here.
• Cross-referencing of surnames in marriages doesn't appear to be working. In my own family, I have a William Smith married a Cecilia Deas in Leslie, Fife, in 1875. Cecilia's certainly in the index:

So is William, the second entry in this list:

The Reference and entry numbers are the same, showing that these index entries refer to the same event (which I already knew, I have a copy of the certificate). The search is supposed to allow you to search for a marriage record using both surnames. But when I tried to do so, this is what came up: 

• Similarly, if you search for a death with two surnames - a standard tactic for finding the death of a woman who married, who should be indexed under both surnames - the search returns index entries that match *either* surname, rather than *both* surnames. My great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Smith, married John Mathieson. From other sources, I know she was alive in 1901, but was dead by 1937. So what happens if I run a search on both surnames?

2643 matches! Quite a lot to trawl through. Now what happens if I search for her under just one of the surnames?

Given that 2493 + 60 = 2553, what the search engine does when you search for a death with two surnames is return all index entries that match either surname. Potentially a useful option in some cases, but not very practical at all in this case. I'm sure Scotland's People will fix these quickly, but just be warned, the search results may not be quite what you're used to.