05 May 2015

Search Irregularities on Ancestry.com's ELCA Records

Again I am confused.

Searching for my Wilhelmina Kraft in the  "Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Records, 1875-1940" gave me this set of search results:

I was searching for a Kraft who died in 1878.

Pulling up the "View Record" brought this screen for Wilhelmine. This seems pretty straightforward.


In an attempt to locate her husband (or other family members), I decided to search for individuals with the last name of Kraft who had any event take place in Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois. I was hoping to find other Krafts. But I should at least have Wilhelmine's entry returned to me.

Nothing.

The entry for Wilhelmine did not even show up--and since she had an "event" in Nauvoo in the database, she should have been returned as a hit. After all, I already had located her complete record in the database and Nauvoo was one of the locations in her entry.


Why doesn't Wilhelmine's entry show up? I'm not certain and it's possible that I am doing something incorrect.

In continued attempts to experiment with the database, I decided to search for all entries that were tagged with Carthage, Hancock County, Illinois as a location. My search terms were all set to "exact."

And then there were my results.

One entry was for Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois.

A view of the record does not include any reference to Carthage. All the references are to Nauvoo.

While Nauvoo is in Hancock County, Illinois, my search was set to "exact" and I should have only received hits that included Carthage, not Nauvoo.

Am I doing something wrong?

Or is there a bigger problem?