Why are surname variants inconsistent in search results?

Question

A search for Hinchey with birth location keyword Clare produces these 12 hits:
* Hinchey x 2
* Hinchy x 10

A search for Henchey with birth location keyword Clare produces these 4 hits:
* Henchey x 1
* Hinchey x 2
* Hinchy x 1

It is conceivable that Hinchey and Hinchy are considered synonyms for Henchey, but not vice versa.

But why is one of the Hinchys considered a synonym for Henchey, but not the other nine Hinchys?

The best-known spelling is probably Henchy, with five notables, one born in Clare, at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henchy

A final search for Henchy with birth location keyword Clare produces these equally perplexing 4 hits:
* Hennessy x 1
* Hinchey x 2
* Hinchy x 1

Comments

To clarify, my impression is that Paddy is not discussing the spelling variations in themselves, or the reasons for them, but rather is focusing on an apparent technical defect in WikiTree Search whereby results depend idiosyncratically on exactly which surname variant (among ones that would be expected to be treated as equivalent) is entered into the Last Name field. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Paddy!

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Spot on, as always, Jim.

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Each list of variants is separate for each surname spelling.

So if you go to the HINCHEY page https://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Hinchey , you can see that "Henchey" is not listed as a variant.

But on the HENCHEY page https://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/HENCHEY , you can see that "Hinchey" is listed as a variant.

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That explains some of the strange behaviour, Jamie, if not the logic behind it. I suspect that many WikiTree users would expect the same results regardless of which of two variant spellings they entered.

However, it does not explain why some of the searches return just one Hinchy and others return ten of them.

Answer 1

This might be why.

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/statistics-education-america-1860-1950

Comments

Hi Doug. Sorry but so far I don't see the relevance of these education statistics to a technical question about WikiTree search :-) Would you like to elaborate?

Answer 2

I believe at least part of the answer is down to what, if anything, has been entered in the "Other Last Name(s)" field on the profiles. For example the one Hinchy profile that appears in the search results for Henchey (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hinchy-21) has "Henchey Hinchey" entered in the "Other Last Name(s)" field. Similarly the Hennessy profile that appears in the search results for Henchy (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hennessy_presumed-1) has "Henchy-O'Brien" entered in the "Other Last Name(s)" field.

Comments

Good detective work, Paul.

If the "Other Last Name(s)" field is part of the search algorithm, then it would be nice to see it included in the search results output.

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Perhaps there's scope for custom apps able to report search results with additional filters and in different formats. This might work better if the searchPerson API limit of 100 results at a time was increased to 1000 like getPeople.