Occasional False Negatives from Parish Record Search (General)

by jmricketts , Tuesday, August 23, 2011, 11:45 (4845 days ago)

Occasionally, I get a false negative result when doing an explicit (Soundex-off) search for an individual. I know it's a false negative because if I turn Soundex on, the name I'm looking for then appears in the results list (as originally spelt). I DO check the spelling when this happens, and the problem does reproduce at the time. But then if I repeat the search the next day, the search works correctly. Because the problem seems to go away (only to return another day), I haven't managed to pin it down more specifically to a particular year, type of event, or range of names. All I can say is that I tend to be working with names located in the Westbury-on-Severn registers, although I haven't necessarily been specifying this parish when encountering the false negatives.

Has anybody else encountered similar problems?