Searching on a Last Name finds household First Names

I wanted to add a little more clarification to this issue, as I’ve been doing a little more digging (and received some offline questions).

First, if in a single line search you just want to search for an exact last name, such as Thomas, you can put the search term in quotes.  When you put the search term in quotes, the wildcard that is normally added at the end of a name search term is not added, so the last name must exactly match what’s in the quotes.  Using this example, the effect would be that only records where the entire last name consists of Thomas would qualify, which would not include any household name that starts with Thomas.  If there is a household with the last name of Thomas, like the John and Jane Thomas Household, that record would still be returned based on its sort name, and it would be listed under the affiliate tree for individual John and Jane records.

On a related note, whenever a household record is returned by a constituent search, the affiliated individuals are also returned in the results as separate result rows.  That can lead to slightly confusing search results at first glance if you have a household that consists of people with two different last names.  If you layer that on top of the initial example, a Thomas last name search that is also returning households with Thomas as the first part of the household name, it can get a little complex.

For example, in my database I have the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery household and the Jim and Elizabeth Thomas household.  If I do a search for Thomas the results I will get are:

The first result on my list is Alison Avery, which doesn’t have Thomas anywhere in the name.  She was returned because her primary household name, Thomas Smith and Alison Avery Household, matched my search on Thomas.  And then she sorted to the top based on her sort name, which is Avery/Alison.

And that brings me to my second extra note.  By default, the search results are sorted by the sort name of the returned constituents.  Most of the time, that’s pretty intuitive, but when you have a result set like the one above, that could be a little confusing at first glance.  Even though it was the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery household that qualified Alison for the search results, once she was in the results she was sorted by her own sort name, Avery/Alison, which in this example ends up coming before all the records that actually have Thomas in their names (Smith/Thomas, Thomas/Elizabeth, and Thomas/Jim).  Additionally there are two other records returned based on the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery Household name that come before any of the records with Thomas as an actual last name because their sort names start with an S (Smith/Thomas).

I’ll be adding some clarification on these issues to the documentation soon.

I wanted to add a little more clarification to this issue, as I’ve been doing a little more digging (and received some offline questions).

First, if in a single line search you just want to search for an exact last name, such as Thomas, you can put the search term in quotes.  When you put the search term in quotes, the wildcard that is normally added at the end of a name search term is not added, so the last name must exactly match what’s in the quotes.  Using this example, the effect would be that only records where the entire last name consists of Thomas would qualify, which would not include any household name that starts with Thomas.  If there is a household with the last name of Thomas, like the John and Jane Thomas Household, that record would still be returned based on its sort name, and it would be listed under the affiliate tree for individual John and Jane records.

On a related note, whenever a household record is returned by a constituent search, the affiliated individuals are also returned in the results as separate result rows.  That can lead to slightly confusing search results at first glance if you have a household that consists of people with two different last names.  If you layer that on top of the initial example, a Thomas last name search that is also returning households with Thomas as the first part of the household name, it can get a little complex.

For example, in my database I have the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery household and the Jim and Elizabeth Thomas household.  If I do a search for Thomas the results I will get are:

The first result on my list is Alison Avery, which doesn’t have Thomas anywhere in the name.  She was returned because her primary household name, Thomas Smith and Alison Avery Household, matched my search on Thomas.  And then she sorted to the top based on her sort name, which is Avery/Alison.

And that brings me to my second extra note.  By default, the search results are sorted by the sort name of the returned constituents.  Most of the time, that’s pretty intuitive, but when you have a result set like the one above, that could be a little confusing at first glance.  Even though it was the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery household that qualified Alison for the search results, once she was in the results she was sorted by her own sort name, Avery/Alison, which in this example ends up coming before all the records that actually have Thomas in their names (Smith/Thomas, Thomas/Elizabeth, and Thomas/Jim).  Additionally there are two other records returned based on the Thomas Smith and Alison Avery Household name that come before any of the records with Thomas as an actual last name because their sort names start with an S (Smith/Thomas).

I’ll be adding some clarification on these issues to the documentation soon.