"Jenny M Benson" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected] > Trying to discover who was a Hannah Paul whose death record I had seen, I > searched FindMyPast "Hampshire Marriages" collection, using the Search > terms Surname = PAUL and Spouse's First Name = HANNAH. One result was > returned, a marriage in 1830 and at that point I realised that in editing > an earlier search I had omitted to delete a time period from the Search > terms. > > I repeated the search using only the Surname and Spouse's First Name and > got no results at all. When I repeated the Search for a 40-year time > period (either side of 1800) there were 5 results returned. > > There is no indication on the Search page that Date is a required field. I > wonder how many times in the past I have failed to get a result because I > was searching on minimum criteria and omitted a Date. > -- > Jenny M Benson I have found this before Jenny, and the similar case of a name being mandatory. In that name case, it gave no indication that an absent name was invalid rather than the norm of implying "any will do". I think this is just a case of bad programming, and not by design. You'd think that their QA team would have found these during testing...? Tony Proctor