Genealogy Locator System Release Notes
Release History Summary
7 June 2017
At long last the online genealogical database I have been talking about for the last two years is up and running. For the meantime it is read only, which means that only I can make changes. I hope to have it set up to add and change records through the web interface later this year, but it will require a bit more research and perspiration on my part to make that possible.
The logic and the searches should work correctly but the interface is a bit rough at the moment, I apologize for that. I just wanted to get this out there where people could look at it and comment, there are a number of design and implementation ideas that I want to get input from other people on before I proceed any further. However, I did want people I have had contact with about this to be able to look at the system at the current stage of its development.
As of launch there are just shy of two thirds of a million people in the database, most of whom were listed on the Forest Lawn of southern California memorial parks website. I am finding other cemeteries and memorial parks to add people from and once I can accept contributions from other people and give them proper credit I expect the database will expand quickly.
At this moment the only cemeteries with a lot of listings are the Forest Lawn memorial parks in California. I am adding other cemeteries that I have relatives in and will be adding people to those cemeteries shortly, but don't be surprised if you find some cemeteries with no one listed or very few people.
Some things I am going to point out right now, some of which will also be addressed in the help files as I work them up:
The people searches are capped at 1000 matches, but for now generating a cemetery search listing will allow you to exceed that limit on a section listing page. Be aware if you generate a section listing for an area with a large number of people (such as Graceland or Sunrise Slope in Forest Lawn Glendale) that it may take a minute or two to finish building the page. That's why I've added the options to build partial section listings with specific lots/plots/spaces and lot or plot ranges.
Speaking of generating section listings by lot and plot ranges, there is an issue with that I will point out now. It's not a bug, but it looks like one. Because the Lot and Space fields are stored as alphanumeric rather than numeric data (because many cemeteries include alpha characters in these fields), the partial section listings include plots outside the requested range, for example, you might search on lots from 20 to 30, you will get lots from 20 to 30, but you will also get lots beginning with 200, 2000, 20000, etc. The listings do sort in the correct order so you should be able to easily find the range you were actually looking for, but you should be aware the system is working that way. So far I haven't found any way to stop this from happening, the only way around it is to search by specific lots and you won't have that problem. If you search for a lot or space range that's a high enough number you also shouldn't run into this problem.
You may run across some people with multiple interment/cenotaph locations. These will look odd at first because they will generate two matches on a people search screen for one person, and when you open the full people record (by clicking on the highlighted people ID on the left side of the screen) you will see multiple interments listed under the person. Sites like Find A Grave force you to create multiple pages for people with multiple interments or cenotaphs, and that leads to a lot of confusion due to their "no duplicates" rule. I've completely sidestepped that issue by allowing multiple interments to be associated with a single person. I have also set up my images table so that marker photos are associated with interment records as well as people records, so if a person has a cenotaph marker in one place and a burial marker in another and pictures of both have been added, the caption at the bottom of the photo tells you which marker you're looking at.
Speaking of photos, the images table has over 10,000 entries but I have only uploaded 40 of the photos so far. I am going to get cracking on that because the people who have photos attached but not uploaded show a big empty box that says 'image not found' and it's annoying. I will get those uploaded as quickly as I can but it may take a few months unless I come up with a much more efficient way to do it, which I am looking for. (Note: Found out it was pretty fast to zip everything up and FTP it and all the missing images have been uploaded as of 19 June 2017 -- or at least all the images I know about, anyway).
BTW, I do know some of the cemetery pages say "country/district" instead of "county/district", I just noticed that the other day and am in the process of fixing them. Also, 20 of the cemeteries don't have the people search logic added yet, but I am fixing that as well.
I need to do some formatting tweaks, for example on the people pages a lot of the events captions are ending up separated from the events listing, I think that should be fairly easy to fix but have ignored it for the time being.
The date fields appear to have quite a bit of redundancy but that is by design. Someone who has full birth and death dates recorded will show both those fields, as well as individual year, month and day entries for birth and death dates. This is by design for right now, at some point I may suppress the full dates if they aren't there (where I have a month and year for a date but not the day). If there are places associated with the birth or death dates you should also see the dates again listed under the events, again, that is by design. I would rather have the dates showing up three times so that I can clear it up if one set is corrupted or lost, then have them show up once and not have any idea if the information is correct or not.
I will eventually add pull down menus for the month and day component of the dates in the search screens, it's pretty straightforward and won't take long to add it to the main search screens. I will add it to the template for the cemetery screens fairly soon but it may take me a while to get back to all the cemetery pages that were built already and add that. It just means for now you have to be careful searching on the dates, if you look for someone with a birthmonth of 13 or higher or a birth day of 32 or higher don't be surprised if you don't get any matches (and let me know if you do get any matches!).
The years I'm not going to do anything with in the search screens, you're on your own as far as making sure those numbers make any sense.
A few notes on the search logic. The search screens are pretty flexible, but the more information you put in the faster they will run and the more specific the results will be. However, if you search on information that hasn't been recorded in the database you're not going to find some people that might actually be there. A case in point is the birth information. I have tens of thousands of people who have death dates but no birth dates, or years only for the birth and death dates. You can start out searching by more specific dates but if you don't find what you're looking for try searching for death dates only or switch to birth and death years only.
The majority of people in the database have events recorded but there are still hundreds of thousands of records missing event information. I'm going to talk more about this in the help files as well. There are people I have social security death index information on without having state death index entries, so for those people I don't necessarily have birth and death events, but I do have residence and social security "last residence" or "last benefit" events, which a lot of people seem to mix up with death entries. In many cases someone's last social security residence is not necessarily the same place as where they actually died, in some cases it's a completely different county or even state. But because many people don't understand the social security death index entries they record information incorrectly.
Speaking of state death index entries, one of my major sources for what I've got so far is the California Death Index entries. They are pretty good and sometimes have almost all the information you are looking for, but there are gaps and oddities in that data as well. In the 1960s they stopped recording father's and mother's surnames, and then started up again in the 1980s. Sometimes they recorded mother's maiden names and not the father's surnames, and other times did the opposite. They also tend to truncate the parent's surnames (field size limit probably) and sometimes they listed the letters 'Zz' to indicate they didn't have that information. In other cases the parent's surnames are garbled, although sometimes they are close enough to figure it out if you know what the surname actually is.
This brings us back to place names. Birth places in the US tended to get recorded accurately (although you will find sites like Ancestry.com have garbled those by sometimes mixing up the US state California with the country of Canada in their CADI entries, for example) but someone born in another country could be recorded correctly or generically. Someone born in England might be recorded as England for one person and another person might be recorded as being born in an unknown foreign country.
BTW, the way I have organized the places tables, there are many entities stored at the level of countries which are not in fact countries, some of these are de facto countries but others are colonies or territories of other countries (examples are Puerto Rico for the U.S., Aruba for the Netherlands, and French Polynesia for France). I have chosen to store these at the country level, even though some of these entities are administered as if they were integral parts of the mother country. My philosophy is, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck. Someone from Aruba is not going to say they are from the Netherlands, they're going to say they're from Aruba. Puerto Rico is an oddity but to maintain consistency with the rest of the places in that table for now I am treating it as a separate country even though it is a U.S. territory. If you want to waste my time complaining that I have listed something as a country that's not a country, you can go somewhere else.
And yes, I have made some political statements here. Hong Kong is part of China, but the Chinese government has given it SAR (Special Autonomous Region) status. They claim to have done the same for Tibet but are treating it as a colony. Therefore I have listed Hong Kong and Tibet (and Macao) as separate countries. I'm sure the Tibetans in Tibet wish they were being treated as well as the people in Hong Kong or Macao.
Digressions aside, from a search standpoint I'm saying that if the information is in the database and recorded correctly you will be able to search on it, but if it's not there or it's recorded incorrectly you're just not going to be able to find people if you are searching too specifically for information that is either missing or incorrect in the database.
A couple of other quick things. The people notes are split into two different fields but neither is that long. I'm going to do some more research on storing text data where MySQL can see it but also store it efficiently and I hope to merge those two fields into one but make it either unlimited in size or virtually unlimited. Something for a later date ... (Note: A partial fix for this is release 1.04 -- small notes are still in the database but any notes bigger than 50 characters have been moved into attached text files with essentially no limit on the size).
I'm considering adding sources to the events because it would be a really good thing to have, I don't think it will be that difficult to program but I would have to add another table to the database and link it to the events table.
I know someone is going to ask about linking relatives. Again, that's a possibility for the future. This is something else Find A Grave has done fairly well so if I implement it on this database I'm going to try and allow more options than they do (such as links for adoptive parents as well as biological ones). Again, something else for future reference. (Note: Added in release 1.01)
A brief note on name fields, the only thing at this point not resolved is "alias" names, like stage names. I may add a place for that, it would certainly be useful. For instance, I have Carole Lombard listed under her real name, Jane Alice Gable, her legal married name at the time of her death. But it would be nice to be able to find her under her stage name. There are a lot of actors and actresses buried at the Forest Lawn locations in Glendale and Los Angeles/Hollywood Hills, so anything to help sort that out would clearly be handy. (Note: Added the fields in release 1.01 and added the search functionality in release 1.03)
Most of the people name fields I have set up should be pretty self explanatory. There are no "maiden name" fields, just father's surname and mother's surname. These apply to both men and women, for women I have tried to add the father's surname into the "full name" field which appears on most of the people pages. The "Patronymic/Matronymic" is for people from countries like Sweden where surnames were not standardized until the late 19th century. I'll explain that in more detail once I get the help screens set up.
The "prior surnames" is to address a problem that sites like Find A Grave just try and ignore. There are at least three different cases I've thought of where it is appropriate to populate that field:
1. A woman has been married multiple times, in that case the field can be filled with the surnames of each of her husbands (in order if possible) separated by spaces, or by just one prior surname if she was only married twice. I do agree with Find A Grave that surnames should not be concatenated (it makes it almost impossible to find someone when that's done) but there should be a way to search for prior surnames, which they have just blown off.
2. If a woman was adopted and has a different "maiden name" than her biological father's surname, that field can also be used for the adopted father's name.
3. Someone (male or female) changed their name so the death records no longer reflect their birth surname. Sometimes immigrants to the U.S. changed their name because their original name was difficult for English speakers to spell or pronounce, or they just wanted their name to appear more "american".
I suspect other situations will come up where that field would be appropriate to use.
Another BTW, I have built wildcards into searching on the prior surnames field, so that way you should be able to find a surname in that field no matter how many other names are also in the field.
That brings me to another topic, how do you do wildcards when searching on names? In MySQL the standard wildcard is the percent sign. It seems to work both as a leading and trailing character. If you want to use a single character wildcard, that is the underscore character. For example, if you don't know if a name is 'Bert' or 'Bart", you can search on B_rt. If you want to find someone named 'Smith' or 'Smithson' or 'Smithy', use Smith followed by %. If you want to find someone who has 'mill' in the surname but it may have characters behind or in front of it, use % mill % in the name field search box.
Name searches are not case sensitive in case anyone is interested.
Under the Interments section, there are three fields that show up and at some point I should just suppress the ones that are blank or not appropriate, those fields are Has Marker, No Marker, and Is Cenotaph. I should be able to suppress those in the future if they are blank or false, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
On the section listings I have a place for photo posted but haven't built any of the logic to actually populate that field. Something else for future reference ... (Note: can't remember when I added that but I did end up adding the logic to do that)
The cemetery names are clickable from the cemetery search screens, I also plan on making them clickable from the people search screens and people pages, I just haven't written the code yet to do that. It's an obvious thing and I should have done it from the beginning but it slipped through the cracks. (Note: Added in release 1.01)
Other than actual cemeteries I have categories such as "Cremated, Ashes Scattered" and "Lost at Sea/Buried at Sea" which are in the cemeteries table and will show up if you pick them out by the cemetery ID, but otherwise won't show up in a cemetery search. I haven't figured out an easy way to disable the clickable link on those entries so if you do click on those you will get an error 404 page not found. Eventually I'll figure out a way so those either don't show up or aren't clickable, but for now bear that in mind. If you hit one of those error 404 screens the easiest thing to do is hit the back button on your browser as many times as is necessary to get to a screen where you can do something else. (Note: I gave up and added pages for those pseudo cemeteries but I set them up so they don't show up in the cemetery lists, only by looking up directly under the ID or by clicking from the people screen of someone with that disposition)
I am still adding the site navigation links to all the pages, eventually I will have them added to everything but in the meantime it shouldn't be too difficult to get back to a screen where you see either the main page link or one of the other links that will get you back to where you want to be. (Note: Added in release 1.04)
I know there are errors and omissions in the database and hope that over time much of the missing information (or misinformation) is cleared up. In some cases missing information may be found by looking on more up to date versions of the cemetery grave locator sites. In other cases it can be gleaned from death indexes, obituaries, or getting marker photos. I have tried to avoid speculating when no hard and fast evidence exists to support a supposition or inference. I am extemely careful when researching people with no markers and those are times I am more likely to call up a cemetery and find out what I can about the person before making an unwarranted assumption.
Even an organization such as Forest Lawn which is a very well run cemetery and mortuary chain occasionally garbles information which has been published on their website. In some cases I have incorporated the garbled information into my database. I have endeavored to find and correct as much of that as I can, but the discerning observer will still find incorrect information from time to time and I appreciate any heads up on that.
Some of the people I have worked with in the past have been super conscientious and meticulous in their research, but I have also had the misfortune of working with people who just "made stuff up" as it suited them and then passed their "made up" facts along as truth. I am not interested in dealing with those kind of people and if I catch someone doing that on this website they will be immediately banned as a contributor. Unfortunately it is very likely that there is some information on this site which has been corrupted by people such as that and I apologize in advance for any such misinformation that you may find.
19 June 2017
All of the photos I am aware of have been uploaded as of earlier today. If anyone notices any people records that come up with an image box that says "image not found" please let me know which person you found that on and I will investigate.
Some of the people records will show two images that appear to be identical, in some cases there is a lower resolution copy of a photo and a higher resolution copy of the same image. I will eventually find all of these and probably just delete the lower res image. There are other instances in which I have the exact same images listed twice in the images table and I just need to clean up the duplicates in the images table, which is again, something I will eventually get to.
I have already had one report of the people search results crashing someone's browser. I have a 64 bit O/S with plenty of memory which is probably why I never ran into this problem. I will add paging support for the search results in the main people screen when I have time, I am hoping to be able to do that next month.
I have played around with some of the larger section listings and I strenously advise you that if you want to look at a people record from one of those larger section listings, right click the people ID on the left and use the browser option to open the page in a new tab. This avoids having to reload the section listing page, which can be agonizingly slow on a large section listing. When done looking at that people record you can just close that tab and go back to the original page without having to reload the whole thing.
I am not likely to get any more coding done on this for the rest of this month, but I hope to be able to pick it up again next month, once I have made some changes I will start adding version numbers to the main page and explain what's new in each release.
5 May 2018
Well, one thing led to another and now it is almost a year since I last updated any of the code. For one thing our roommate, who had been quite ill, got worse and became eligible to be included in the database (which he eventually was, although I waited until I could make sure he was assigned a nice round people id number). That threw some serious monkey wrenches into my plans for several months, although it was way more inconvenient for Randall than for me that he passed away.
Anyway, here's what's been added to the site in the last week:
Release 1.01
Added clickable cemetery links from the people search screens and people main pages.
Added clickable cemetery section links from the people search screens and people main pages.
Added clickable cemetery and cemetery section links within the section listing pages (this is a bit redundant but I added it anyway to maintain consistency with the other people screens).
Fixed a bug in the people search within cemetery sections pages that was malforming the clickable link to people records within those search results and creating page not found errors, that was an easy fix and I should have done it much sooner, my bad.
Added relationship links to people pages (I had added this logic to the database months ago and finally updated the display of the people pages to incorporate the relationship links).
Added AKA fields to the people pages and updated the pages to display them, there are now AKA fields for first, middle and last names and a corresponding AKA full name field to match the individual fields. There are very few records that have this information recorded but since the fields are there now the information will eventually get added. BTW I haven't added the ability to search on those fields yet, that might happen in the next release. (Note: Added in release 1.03)
There are only 500 entries in the relationships table so for now you will mainly see a place for the links on the people pages but no actual links (unlike the events table, which has almost 850,000 entries, so most of the people records have at least one event).
A note about the clickable section links. I have to update the cemetery pages and add the tag anchors so the section links go to the correct places on the cemetery pages. Until I do so, the section links will work like the cemetery links, they will just go to the top of the corresponding cemetery page and you will have to scroll down to find the section you are looking for. It may take me a month to get all the anchors added to the cemetery pages but once that's done most of the section links will go right to the place on the cemetery pages where the options are to search that particular section.
I will add those anchors for all the cemeteries where I have more than 10 sections defined, ones that have less than that I'm not going to bother with until I add more sections.
I also added pages for the non cemetery burials and/or cremations. They don't show up under the cemetery listings directly since they're not cemeteries, but you can look them up by the cemetery ID or by clicking on the links from a people record which is listed under that disposition. You can actually search through them if you want, although there are less than 500 people at this point who are not connected to a specific cemetery. That number will go up as I add more relatives of people where I don't know where the relatives are buried.
I had been afraid after not touching the PHP code for several months that I would have forgotten how everything worked but apparently that is not the case. I'm hoping since my brain is still working that I'll be able to get the code updated more often.
BTW, I do realize I have to get the user accounts set up correctly and also set up the system so that users can make edits, add new records, and add photos. For reasons I won't divulge here, I will be working on that after this coming August.
What I'm hoping to accomplish in the next release is to add paging support for the people search pages so that people whose systems can't accomodate all the search results at once will be able to view the search results in groups small enough not to crash their browsers.
I would also like to be able to add more granularity to the geographic searches so that you will be able to search below the state level in the events table in the US and below the country level for countries other than the US. I also want to get started on the events searches. I've thought about all these functions but I'm not quite where I need to be yet in terms of adding them.
Oh and let's not forget the help file ...
I also need to clean up the people notes, right now there are two notes fields and it's a mess. I actually need to do more research on that to figure out what to do about it. I'd like to have one notes field that's either unlimited or virtually unlimited in size and have that supersede the other notes fields. (As mentioned above, didn't solve the problem with the existence of two different people notes fields, but did make it so the people notes longer than 50 characters in length are now stored in an attached file which as far as I know can be unlimited or virtually unlimited in length, this was added in release 1.04).
'Til next time ...
Release 1.02
I didn't get any of the stuff done in this release that I thought I was going to do. Nor have I updated most of the cemetery pages to reflect the section shortcuts that I thought I was going to update when I did the last release back in May. However, I did add about 600 cemeteries in the last three months, and I replicated some more people from Find A Grave whom I wished to liberate from their evil clutches.
So you're probably asking, Chris, if you didn't do any of the things you said you were going to do, then what in hell did you do?
What I did was to add support for military information to people who served in the military who were in the database. That involved adding some tables to the database and doing some research, then populating those tables and updating the people search logic screens so that information could be searched on. I'm pretty happy with the results although I did just notice something which I'll eventually need to deal with, which is that people show up in the searches who have a rank or branch of service or service during a conflict but if they are missing a branch of service or service during any conflict they won't show up in the searches. I'll probably have to add another search screen to address those outliers who are not being picked up in the screens I just added. Fixed those potential problems by adding dummy ranks, dummy branches of service, and dummy conflicts served in so if a person has military service but is missing any of the three components necessary for them to show up in a military search, the dummy values will provide the missing data the searches are expecting. The most common problems are missing ranks and either no service during wartime or no listed service during wartime).
Other than that I tweaked the formatting on the photo captions, which was long overdue.
All that other stuff I talked about before is still on the table. I did make it easier to generate the cemetery pages as well, they're still static but I updated the PHP code to remove a couple steps from generating the pages, which has been a real time saver since I added so many cemeteries lately. There are over 850 cemeteries in the database now, and the only one with no people added to it is a national cemetery in New York which isn't actually complete yet.
Once again ... 'til next time ...
Release 1.03
Whew! This was a doozy!
Added display of associated keywords to the people screen.
Added clickable links for the URL listings in the people records
Added the capability for clickable links for the URL listings in the cemetery pages (unfortunately I have to regenerate all the cemetery pages for those to show up). Since there are almost a thousand cemeteries in the database now those are going to get updated intermittently and it may be years before I get them all updated. On the plus side, all the new cemetery pages will be formatted correctly as I create them. All the cemeteries with an ID of 949 or higher have the new format pages.
Reworked the people search screens so the main screen is an anchor screen and the different searches launch from different pages (except for the lookup by people ID, which is still on the main screen and also on the separate record lookup page).
Added AKA name searches to the standard people search (but only that search, because I didn't want to bother updating all the other searches). This is the standard "Search by Names and/or Birth or Death Dates" option.
Added a keyword search option for people. This took some work but now that it's done it points me towards reworking the place searches in a future version so that you will be able to search for people off of any geographic place that's defined in the database.
There are only a couple of dozen keywords but it's a slick feature. It's like the virtual cemeteries in Find A Grave but the keywords are global, anyone can look at these lists.
Eventually the keyword lists will get large and unwieldy enough that I will have to make the keywords themselves searchable, but we're nowhere near there yet.
Added Family Search ID lookup and Find A Grave memorial number lookup options. Be warned, these can be a little slow. But the option is there now.
I have wrestled with adding the find a grave search options and the find a grave links to the people screens. I have had a love/hate relationship with find a grave and for the most part I refuse to work on it anymore. That being said, it's still a useful resource even though you have to take everything on the site with a grain of salt. So that's why I gave up and added those features.
I'm really proud of this release. I know there's still tons of other stuff to be done with the site but I think this was a real leap forward. It will be months and months before I get any more serious work done on this so I'm just glad I was able to get this stuff done.
Cheers for now!
Release 1.04
This has not been a whirlwind of changes like some of the previous releases, and these were not overnight changes, some of these were done months ago but I didn't worry about changing the version number because it has been a collection of small changes, nothing dramatic. I think the cumulative number of changes is enough now to warrant another version upgrade.
First, I just fixed the problem with the search screens where you had to hit the back arrow when you did a search with no results because there was nothing to click on to get back to where you came from. This was trivial to fix and I'm ashamed it took me so long to take care of it. I also fixed the place searches because those were dead end screens as well. The real dramatic change with the place searches will be when I program them to generate people, cemetery or event searches based on location information, but we're not there yet.
I made another change to the cemetery pages. They are static pages so there is no way to refresh them with the number of people linked to a cemetery in real time. However, I added a button to the new cemetery pages that gives you a count of associated people. That button executes very quickly, typically within a couple of seconds. It's much faster than searching for all the names in a cemetery (which will only give you the first 1000 names anyway) so I figure it's just handy to have.
This was added right after I made the last change to the cemetery pages. As of this moment a little over 25% of the cemetery pages are the most up to date version, and of course that percentage will keep going up unless I make some other dramatic change to the cemetery page format (which I might do!).
BTW, there are close to 1400 cemeteries in the database now.
I finally came up with a fix for the people notes. There are still two sets of notes, the small notes (less than 51 characters) and the other notes, which have been moved into attached files. So any person who requires more than 50 characters of notes is getting a text file that's linked to the person. The text file can be any size. Because the text files are parsed through an html interface, hyperlinks can be embedded and any other kind of html formatting can be used, so for all practical intents and purposes they are html files, but without requiring any of the overhead of html headers or any of that stuff. It took a little bit of work to get it to happen but I'm pretty happy with the results.
It's probably more efficient to store the small notes inside the database, but I did want a way to have essentially unlimited size notes available for some people if the amount of information on them warranted it. And the attached text files do solve that problem.
The relationships table is up to almost 10,000 links now. Nothing has changed with the logic, there are just more people linked to each other now.
I also added another table to the database for non marker photos. What this means is that portraits of people can be added, along with other types of images that have nothing to do with grave markers. These images have captions which have no references to any interment locations. There are only a few people in the database with these attached photos, but the capability is now there to add portraits and other non marker photos without reworking anything in the interface or any of the programming logic.
That's all I can think of now that was added. Happy holidays to anyone reading this and we should see more features next year!
Postscript on Release 1.04
The idea of adding more functionality to the place searches kept bugging me, so even after I thought I had frozen this release I kept toying with it. As of right now (8 December 2019) I changed the place names search and added options to search the events table for people associated with specific places. I have started with the county/district level searches and those appear to be working now. As time permits I will add this same logic into both the lower and higher level place searches. It should be fairly trivial to add those to the other levels since I was able to get it to work on one level.
Yes, it is fairly trivial. I wrote that two hours ago and have already added the same search to the city/town level. Yay!
Eventually I would like to add some additional searches to the place names searches but who knows when I will get those done, so I'm not going to promise anything right now.
Postscript 2 on Release 1.04 (9 December 2019). OK, well I did go ahead and add the additional searches under the place names, which is what I spent the last two days on. Now you can search all places within a place (states under countries, counties under states, cities under counties, and city districts or villages under cities) and you can search for cemeteries linked to places as well. The additonal cemetery search is a bit redundant as there was already a cemetery search option, this just works a bit differently, maybe better for some people, maybe worse for other people. Just another way of searching, in any event.
So, the changes to the place searches are all done for now, and I'm not going to touch that part again for a while.
I want to say that this should lock down release 1.04, but there's one other thing I might do before I call it quits on this for the rest of the year. It's not going to be something terribly noticeable, so I may just sneak it in.
Release 1.05
Odd to say, if anything the pandemic has been helpful for the database (No! I'm not talking about more people dying so they can be included in the database!).
But seriously, I've been stuck at home even more than usual, so I am getting a lot of research done and some coding as well.
As expected, I kept fiddling with the cemetery screens. They now have clickable links to the places they are located in. Just over a third of the cemetery pages have been updated, and all the new pages are being generated with the new format.
I was having a quandary with generating the cemetery pages. Most of the commercial and the city run cemeteries are large enough to have sections, unlike the small rural and even smaller family cemeteries. It didn't seem to make sense to have to hardcode the different sections on each cemetery page. So I added a button that dynamically queries the database to see which sections are defined for a lot of these cemeteries. As enough sections get added it will of course make sense to hard code the cemetery pages to search them properly, but in the meantime the sections can be dynamically queried to see who is buried in them. It's not as slick as what I have set up for some of the large cemeteries in California and for Arlington and a few others, but it works fine and if I don't have a lot of people recorded for a particular cemetery it's just as good as the searches that are more specific but take longer to set up.
I also just added a lookup option for the cemeteries so they can be looked up by the Find A Grave code. That's documented on a page that is linked directly from the cemetery search and lookup page.
I did some monkeying around with the people search screens as well. I added a gender search to the basic people search. About 89% of the people in the database have a defined gender, the remaining 11% are coded either as unknown gender or not coded gender. The unknown genders are either ambiguous names or foreign names that I can't even hazard a guess at. The not coded ones include normal names that I just didn't take the time to go through when I was importing the people.
There is now a people search that includes burial location (just like Find A Grave!). Well, not exactly. I don't constrain the searches using places in the database. If you're looking for people buried in Illinois, just type Illinois in the state/province box. And for God's sake, don't misspell the places for the cemeteries, otherwise you won't get anything!
If you're not sure how a place is spelled go to the places search and look for it. If you know what the higher level place is it belongs to (states for counties, counties for cities) start higher and drill down into the lower level places. Also be aware that I don't always match cemeteries with where Find A Grave has placed them, when it comes to the city or town level. They have also done some weird things with some of the places that don't correspond to reality, which I didn't do. They have city districts within the city of Los Angeles that they list as cities (ditto for the borough of Queens in New York City).
When in doubt, search at the county level rather than the city level. Of course, I might have found a few cemeteries where Find A Grave has them in the wrong county, come to think of it ...
The logic in that search works just like searching for a cemetery in the cemetery search screen. Except that you're looking for people, not cemeteries.
I was doing some research on a particular family recently and realized it actually was useful to be able to search for people where they are buried. So I spent a morning working up the code and got it running fairly quickly.
I will go ahead and put a help screen up for that search just to explain how it works for people.
I added another search as well but I'm not sure if anyone else will feel a need to use it. Sometimes when I'm searching the grave locators for some of the big cemetery systems I want to be able to search for people only within the corresponding cemeteries within the database. So I added an option to do that, it's the search people "constrained by cemetery groups.". I added a link on that page to a brief help file that explains what it does.
This option just makes it easier when I'm on some of the cemetery websites to see which of the people I'm finding are already in the database.
That kind of segues into something else I finally dealt with. Any time I pull enough entries from Find A Grave I always get duplicate people, and sometimes I just screw it up myself without any help from find a grave. Everyone knows the problem. One person gets entered with their first and middle names switched around. Another person looks like a different person because the death years don't match. Someone else gets entered into two different cemeteries. Sometimes it's because one is a cenotaph but more likely just because somebody made a mistake.
Bottom line, duplicate entries get created. What I had done until recently was just delete them out of the database, but then that ends up creating weird looking screens if you stumble across one of the deleted people ids. The resulting screen is quite ugly, it's a people record with no data.
This is one thing that find a grave frequently does right, as does family search dot org. When you find a record that did exist that was rolled into another record because it was a duplicate, you're given an opportunity to go to the new record.
I implemented something very similar for the database and just added it to the web site interface in the last couple of days. Going forward, any records which I find which are duplicates will be masked with a link to the surviving record displayed.
Unfortunately, there are over 1500 entries out there that I did prior to that which just say the record was deleted with no explanation. Virtually all of them are duplicates, I just don't know now who they are duplicates of. But rest assured, going forward, that duplicates will be redirected properly to the correct people record.
After I did the clean up for the last version where I tried to find all the screens where you could do a query with no results and give you an option to back out of that query, I realized that some of the return options don't actually go back to where you launched the search from. I know how to fix this but I'm going to have to track down these queries and do a bit of recoding. I will eventually do it but it hasn't been a big priority as of right now.
I did find something much more annoying which I should have noticed earlier and just didn't. I just realized recently that you can't search for people by name who have apostrophes in their names (the standard Irish names like O'Neal and O'Malley come to mind). I will have to eventually figure out how to trap the apostrophes in a query and substitute something for them which will work. But for right now, I have a workaround, and here's what you need to do:
Anytime you have an apostrophe in a name that you are searching for, substitute the underscore character for the apostrophe. That will return everything the apostrophe would have returned. You will get some more results as well, but I think you will be able to figure out which ones are the people you were looking for.
Well this is embarassing ...
I tried searching for some names with apostrophes in August 2021 (over a year after the preceding paragraph was written) and it doesn't work now. I think it did work before, but now I'm not sure. In any event, I've figured out another way to do it and written a help topic that explains how to search for names with apostrophes, there is a link to the help topic immediately below:
Searching for people with apostrophes in their names
Oh, here's some good news. The people search results are capped at 10,000 names now rather than 1,000. Not that big a deal to open it up to that level and the servers now are so fast I don't think it's a problem.
BTW, there are now over 1600 cemeteries in the database and 13,000 relationship pairs defined. I've been doing a lot of research on some particular families and have been adding a lot of relationship links.
I'm not done fiddling with the people searches by place names. They are useful but need some more work. They work fine for places without a lot of people attached to them. But the results quickly become overwhelming when searching a place where a lot of people have been born, lived or died. Just for example, I did a search within the database of people who died in Los Angeles County. It returned around 329,000 matches. I did a social security last residence search on just the city of Los Angeles. That returned 5500 matches (and I only have the social security death index information on a very small number of people).
I need to add more logic to allow you to search on a geographical area but also constrain the search by dates or by other information about the people you're looking for. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to do that, but it might be the next release or even the one after that, it's going to be a fair amount of work. Once I have it working I will update the code and it will be useable once the search screens and queries have been updated.
Anyway, that's all for now. I'm pretty happy with what I got done on this release and I think the interface just keeps getting better and better!
Hopefully by the time the next release is out things will be, if not back to normal, closer to normal than they are now. Of course, I realize that some things are never going to go back to the way they were. And what's that old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times!".
Everyone stay safe and stay out of trouble!
Release 1.06
No earth shattering updates for this version, just a lot of minor additions and changes. Some of these were actually done last year and I never bothered updating the version at that time.
All cemetery pages are now up to date, and there are almost 2200 cemeteries now. Over 5,000 people relationships have been added in the last year as well.
I am doing some stuff under the hood to deal with the people without defined genders. I've set up some tables within the database which are not visible but they should help with identifying known gender names as well as garbled names. If all goes well that should cut down the number of people without assigned genders.
I still haven't fixed the problem on searching for names with apostrophes in them. So keep using the workaround I noted above in the release notes for 1.05
I still want to add more granularity to the people searches based on geographical places either below the county level or in sub country level places outside the U.S. If it were easy I would have done it almost a year ago. The problem is that I won't know how hard it will be until I start working on it. So we'll see if I ever get it added.
I added searches for famous people several months ago. I only added the display in the people records of that information today. I have two fields because there are people who are clearly famous who find a grave has not recognized as famous, so I added my own "famous" field independent of the find a grave status. I haven't updated the database yet to reflect all the people in the database that find a grave thinks are famous so that they show up as famous on my end. But I'll eventually get it done.
I added searches for people with attached marker photos, and people with attached marker transcriptions. There are also variants of these searches to look for people missing birth or death years who have those attachments. In cases where there are markers with dates on them, it should make it easier to clean up the records in the database missing birth and/or death years.
(Now I just have to research all those people with no dates who have markers that don't show any dates, then there are the people whose attached photographs are "no marker" shots so those aren't terribly informative either ... )
I also added searches to find people missing birth and/or death years, independent of whether or not they had attached marker photos or transcriptions. This is also to make it easier to find people missing critical data.
I added a notes field to the people keywords to make the information more descriptive. I added this field some time ago but just changed the interface today so that information would actually show up on the people screen.
I also did something which will save me a lot of time going forward. The version and copyright notice appears on over 30 pages and I was updating it by hand with every release. I now have it point to an image on the server. When I change the version or want to change the copyright dates I can just update the image and it will update on all the pages it appears on. I had been thinking about doing that before and since I added some new search pages with this version it just didn't make any sense to keep updating all those pages by hand.
2021/05/19. I just now added one more set of searches which ties in with the theme of finding people with missing dates. The searches look for people within specific sections of cemeteries who are missing either birth or death dates, or both birth and death dates. There are some sections in Forest Lawn Glendale I've been pounding on for over 10 years now and I just wanted to make it easier to search for people missing that data within particular sections. It only took a couple of hours of coding since I was able to make some minor tweaks to the section listing code and it was so easy all three of the new searches worked right out of the box once I got the modules created and uploaded.
These are searches that are only meaningful on larger cemeteries like Forest Lawn and its ilk. For smaller cemeteries they are pretty useless, and in fact they will only work on people who have a defined cemetery section attached to their interment. Again, I will use the searches, and if anyone else gets any use out of them that's an added bonus.
