My guess is that this depends on which list the County Notable status has been attached to Tony. That's what usually happens. You will probably find that when you try it the second way, either you are looking at the taxa in a non-preferred list and the status belongs to the preferred one, or you are looking at the preferred list but have applied the status to a non-preferred one.

The first method finds the status whichever list the status belongs to, because it incorporates the synonymy.

Its a bit of a nuisance I know, but until the latest upgrade there was no single Organism table (equivalent to the old taxon dictionary in R3), so the statuses are all attached to particular lists. Now that we have the Organism table it would make more sense if taxon designations were connected to this, rather than via  a list, but I suspect that would involve reworking a lot of other stuff and might be more complicated than it is worth.

Taxon Designations can be added and edited under Dictionary/Edit Taxon Details. You need to know the dictionary list used to add any user defined designations. Designation should be under statuses for the taxa.  Just a reminder not to use any of the system supplied designation lists to add local designations. Any of the other list should ok, but the preferred lists probably the most suitable.

The SQL which poulates Index_taxon_designation finds any synonyms and children of anything which is in the Taxon_designation_table and applies the designation to all of these. There has to be a Taxon_List_Item key in the Taxon_designation table which feeds this process, so Taxon_designastion is the place to look.  You should be able to find all the users defiined entries in the Taxon_Designation_table which have the designation type you are interested in.  The entry must be  there somewhere,  but it may not be that obvious.    The SQL finds the Synonyms and children by looking at all the list, which can cause problems, because some of the lists are badly constructed. Now we have the ognanism table we will be able to use this to find the children, which should improve things.