The only constant is change

I am trying to love the new Family History Research Service launched by the Queensland Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages on June 6. After all, I don't want to be labelled a grumpy old man who wants everything to stay just the way it "always" has been. So I am trying, but gee they make it difficult.

Let's begin by acknowledging that the new search facility has brought some wonderful new features. How could anyone complain about immediate access to the full date of an event without the need for fiddly split-half search techniques? And we all appreciate the opportunity to purchase images of the original source documents as an alternative to the register entry (for the same price) with the possible bonus of additional correspondence at no extra charge.

And how about the new global search facility? Well, let's examine that for a moment. I often use our 2xgreat grandfather Thomas Henry Suddaby as a test subject. His name is rare enough that it almost always produces a manageable set of results. Now when I used the "old" search engine, I was limited to a single given name but a search for the birth Suddaby, Thomas produced two records (that for my target and one for his son with similar but not identical given names). Similarly, I located two death records (father and son) and two marriages (one for the target and the other for his daughter marrying a man with the same given name as her father).

With the new improved tool, a simultaneous search across all three datasets for Thomas Suddaby returned 221907 hits. Editing the search term to Thomas Henry Suddaby (additional given names are an added feature of the new service) increased the number to 405391. Does anyone remember when we were advised to "widen your search by entering fewer fields, and less exact information"? Now it seems that the opposite is true.

Fortunately for those appalled by those numbers, in the last few days an enhancement has been made offering the option to "Show only exact matches on names". When that was applied to my search the number of hits dropped to a mere 404932.

Perhaps, the simultaneous search is an unfair comparison. When I limit the new search to one event type at a time (as in the "old" system), it returns 127803 births, 90504 marriages and 186625 deaths. At least, it is consistent.

Of course, the quantity of hits is not the only (or even the most important) criterion of a search procedure. How relevant are the results returned? In each case, at least the first dozen results for each event referred to known members of the family of T H Suddaby and that was true of 58% of the first 50 entries in the aggregated search. But 47 of them were not the records I was searching for!

The new service has achieved this (admittedly impressive) feat of identifying records with an incidental relationship to the actual search being conducted by the introduction of "fuzzy" search algorithms. If I were a novice researcher making my first search with a single isolated name, I might be very excited to be presented with details of more than 20 other related people spread across three generations. As a grizzled veteran looking for a specific piece of information, my response is frustration rather than joy.

Perhaps when I find the switch to turn off, or even to moderate, the "fuzziness" of the search then I will come to love the new service. Grumpy old men will have the tool with which we they are familiar and the beginners will have immediate access to a flood of names and dates to maintain their burgeoning interest.

The page called Searching our historical records—hints and tips will surely explain how to regain some sensible measure of control over the process. Sadly, it does not. On the other hand, it does offer fascinating insights into the use of wildcards and sorting your results. Which is rather depressing because these were important features of the old system that have been disabled (lost|stolen|destroyed depending upon your current level of frustration). Never mind, in a short time, the help page will be cripplededited to correspond to the limitations of the search tool. Then a whole generation of genealogists will grow up not knowing what a price has been paid for the "improvements" we now enjoy.

But I really do not want to be seen as the old codger who pines for "the good old days". A positive response to my predicament would be to see how much of the functionality of the old site I can reconstruct in other tools. Clearly the first step is to copy the results returned from the web page into a spreadsheet for local manipulation.

Did I happen to mention that the format in which results are displayed has also been enhanced within the new service? That old-fashioned tabular presentation has been jettisoned in favour of something that scales nicely on small screen devices. Of course, making the list nice to read on a phone does mean the items cannot be pasted easily into a spreadsheet ...

I am trying to love the new Family History Research Service. I am, really. I don't want to be a whinger. But gee they make it difficult.

Keeping up to date

The recent availability for on-line purchase of digital images of historical Queensland BDM registration documents has caused a flurry of renewed interest in what is now open but then (predictably) focused our interest on those things that remain inaccessible.

Policies to protect the private information of living individuals mean that there are time limitations on what information is on open access. The site sets out that

You can search for births which occurred more than 100 years ago; marriages which occurred more than 75 years ago and deaths which occurred more than 30 years ago.

So if a death occurred in January of 1984, you can not yet obtain the details without a special application (citing an appropriate relationship and justification). But just when will its status change to become available as an historical record?

Users certainly hope that the next update cycle is shorter than the last when online availability of the index to Death Registrations jumped from 1963 to 1983 in one step. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any statement that indicates when the next batch of records will be transferred from closed to open (that is, historical) status.

If the Attorney-General is looking for an example of world-leading practice in the field to emulate, I commend to him the following

The records available are updated nightly as the embargo period is reached.
from https://bdmhistoricalrecords.dia.govt.nz/home/

Yes, you did read that correctly. BDM records in New Zealand are updated every 24 hours, so that you can access grandfather's birth registration on the day after the 100th anniversary of the event. There is no further waiting period.

I learned this from what I consider an exemplary model of how to present a "how to use the ... records". If you have any interest in the area, devote twenty minutes to a look at the presentation New Zealand Births, Deaths, and Marriages Online from the Family Search Learning Center.

The government giveth ... and taketh away

Family historians love records of death because they provide a jumping-off point to explore the previous generation. From this registration of the death of John Gaskell in Queensland in 1912, I was able to obtain the names of his parents and then begin the search for records of their marriage, then for the birth of siblings, and so on.

So when the website of the authority responsible for BDM in Queensland (Department of Justice and Attorney-General) moved to a new government services portal yesterday, I was anxious to see what (if any) impact this might have on users.

Obviously the very prominent shopping cart was a pointer that the previously-free site had been commercialised. There was a new function enabling me to purchase digital images of selected historical records for (almost) immediate download and to order printed "replica" certificates. That is clearly a worthwhile service enhancement, although we may quibble about the prices.

It is annoying that instead of being able to link directly to the search page for one type of records, I must go through the Terms and Conditions page every time I connect and take three extra clicks to reach the tool I want; but I can understand that is considered necessary in a commercial environment.

I am sure that I will learn to live with these procedural changes, just so long as the information I need is still readily accessible on the redesigned page.

Did you spot the huge difference? No, not the very tasteful Order Product button. The fact that the maiden name of John Gaskell's mother is not displayed. The content of the single most valuable field in the record (for a family historian) has been truncated to the extent that the information provided is useless!

It is clearly not the case that the information is not in the file. In 2011 when I captured the top screenshot, it was displayed in full without charge. In 2013, I can provide my credit card details and be charged $20 for each and every record that I want to use.

I might become a paying customer; or I might just treat this on-line service as a flawed and incomplete index to the microfiche collection held at my local library where I can read all the fields in full.

Because the capability of new technology is irrelevant without some common sense from those who implement it. That would be smart service, Queensland.