WT+ search for born/died before/after a certain year

Question

Is there already a way to use WT+ to search for profiles with birth or death dates before or after a certain year? If not, could this be added?

In the US Black Heritage Project, we frequently want to do different searches using 1865 as a cut off date - this is when slavery was legally ended in the USA and so there are different records sets we look at before/after 1865 and this determines whether or not we're working with the Heritage Exchange system we have for documenting slavery. Depending on what we're doing in the project, I frequently want to be able to search for just people born before 1865 or just people born after 1865.

Sometimes I've also wanted to be able to use this kind of search when I'm doing sourcing and a certain record set only covers certain years. For example, death certificates in Ohio are only available online for people who died between 1908 and 1953, so this is a time period I like to work in for sourcing Ohio profiles.

I'm sure many other people could find uses for these search terms as well.

Answer 1

I added a possibility to use direct condition. It is limited to check only 200000 profiles found in the left part of the search query. So you first find the profiles of interest like Black Heritage 

and then you add an sql condition
sql="[Birth Date] < 18650000"

here is a link
https://plus.wikitree.com/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=Black+Heritage+sql%3D%22%5BBirth+Date%5D+%3C+18650000%22

There are many things you can write in SQL but it is a whole new sintax. Ask if you want something else.

I will monitor how this performs and do some changes if there will be problems.

Comments

Thanks so much Aleš!!!! This will be so helpful for our project! I know there's one category clean-up we need to do regularly that will be SO much easier with this possibility and I know we'll find all kinds of other uses for it.

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Thank you so much, Aleš! this is going to help us with many searches as well as making sure our categories are being used properly.

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Aleš! This is going to help us SO much!!! Thank you!

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A few notes on SQL sintax.

I remembered that for private profile dates are in a decade form (1-2020) to compensate for that you should use  [Birth Date num] or [Death Date num]. There is also [Birth Date Estimate] that predicts the birth date even if not entered.

There are also fields [Birth Date min] and [Birth Date max] that could be use in cases when only year or year and month are entered.

You can use > >= = < <= <> operators. You can also use in operator with a range.
sql="[Birth Date num] in 18650000..18669999"

To be very precise with month and day you should actually use 
([Birth Date max] >= in 18650113) and ([Birth Date min] < 18650299)
But I think that is overly complicated for your cases.

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Thanks - that's very helpful info!

Answer 2

To make such comparations, all profiles must perform aditional compare operation and that is 1000 times slower than indexes that are currently in use.

However you can use decade keywords.

1940s Not 1950s  returns profiles that have death date in 1940-1949

1940s Not 1930s  returns profiles that were born in 1940-1949

Comments

That helps in come cases but in some cases where we really want to check certain things on profiles for people born 1865 or earlier, it gets really impractical. As far as I understand, we'd have to do 14 separate searches or one very long complicated search with lots of OR operators to get all of these date ranges:

• 17cen
• 18cen
• 1800s
• 1810s
• 1820s
• 1830s
• 1840s
• 1850s
• B1860
• B1861
• B1862
• B1863
• B1864
• B1865

To check things on profiles of people born after 1865 is a little easier, but still requires 10 separate searches or one very long complicated search with lots of OR operators to get all of these date ranges:

• B1866
• B1867
• B1868
• B1869
• 1870s not 1860s
• 1880s not 1870s
• 1890s not 1880s
• 20cen
• 21cen

So it's possible to find all the profiles we need, but it's so complicated and time-consuming to use this method that we rarely use it. Having a single search term for before/after 1865 would make many things we do so much easier, even if the search is slower. Currently, doing all these separate searches or writing one really long, complicated search with lots of OR terms takes a long time, so I'm not sure any time would actually be saved for people like me who would be doing the search.

If it's too taxing on the servers, I can understand that, but from my perspective, it would still be very useful to have a before/after [date] search term, even if it is significantly slower than some other searches.

Answer 3

This would make my life SO much easier!