FamilySearch

Please add your useful search tips for FamilySearch here.

FamilySearch.org

 

Only recently discovered this feature of the website and I'm loving it.

Historic Maps shows counties, parishes and more.

 

One really useful tip with family search is to search for children born to particular parents. This is very easy and often throws up many other children for a family, so that you fill out your tree rather than having long lines of families with a single child. As Peter has often pointed out it is far far more likely that you will find a Lost Cousin through brothers and sisters of your direct lines than you will find one of your direct ancestors.

To use the the children search feature do the following... I'll use the example of finding the children of John Bisset (my 2nd cousin 6 times removed) and Margaret McDonald

1. Starting from the front page, click search link at the top of the page
2. On this page enter the surname of the children you are looking for (in this case Bisset) DO NOT enter a forename
3. Enter a country in this case Scotland
4. The default should be on births (birth is greyed out) if not click on birth
5. Skip birthplace, the key to these searches is that you don't restrict the results too much
6. Click on parents to open up the parents list
7. Enter John Bisset as forename & surname of father
8. Enter Margaret McDonald as forename & surname of mother (NB. this works for Scottish records as women's maiden names were almost always recorded, For English/Welsh etc records leave surname blank)

Your form should now look like this...

Now click on Search and you should get back something that looks like this...

It might be a bit difficult to see on the forum image but try it for yourself on the Familysearch.org website. What you should see is 10 entries for children matching the couple's names. However notice that the latter 4 are clearly from a different family as the years are a generation out. The correct family is the first 6 from Kincardineshire, as it happens the earlier couple are my lot too, just a neighbouring county
This is a very useful search technique, however use it wisely don't just assume if the name fits it must be yours. You need to back up the search with more research. However this search does give you lists of candidate names.

By clicking on each of the search results you can get the full details although the summary page has most of the info you need. This includes the exact date of birth/christening and the place it was recorded.

Sometimes getting that list of candidate names all you need, as sometimes the "brick wall" is when you focus entirely on your direct ancestor and don't try to see if you can find a sibling. So many times my direct ancestor doesn't show up in a census search but by finding a brother or sister on a census I find my direct living with them and missing from the index because of a really bad transcription errors. Often a bit of lateral thinking or in this case lateral relatives can solve a puzzle.

I hope this helps.

 

One of the things about a good search engine is that it permits you to modify your searches easily so you can do a min/max method. ie: put in the minimum search terms to get the maximum good hits. In your case you have too many hits. However look carefully at the search form on the left if you click on items it opens up a new search area (this isn't that intuitive at first) adding an extra search term will limit down the search. So for instance by default it searches all types of records so click on "Type" and a new record type box opens up. Tick the box for "Births, Baptisms & Christenings" to exclude other types of records and click the search button again this will reduce the count further. Note if you open a search form you didn't mean to clicking the X beside the form will remove that bit of the search from your query.

 

To add to what Alexander just mentioned, on the bottom left of the menu is an area called "Filter your Results By".
Here you can select, different countries, different record types, different periods.

Very useful in helping you narrow down your results to the area/time period that you're interested in.

 

The "usual caveats" about IGI are radically different from what they once were. The databases have been completely separated and are clearly identified as to their type. This means that unlike in the past where the "submitted by member of the church" records (aka sometimes no better than a random guess) were mixed in with the carefully transcribed records and so "IGI" search produced poor results, these days you get results from "proper" databases.

With the new search there are considerably more databases online than just the old IGI database. In fact the old IGI database is just a small part of the databases it searches. It is possible to specify a specific old databases to do an old style "IGI" search of just the transcribed records but I don't know why anyone would bother. So these days on the familysearch.org website its actually quite tricky to limit your searches to just the IGI database. As such its not really that relevant to call the familysearch website "the IGI".

So the only real caveats are about relying on a secondary source such as family search, however that caveat equally applies to FreeBMD, FreeReg etc which are also transcription sites, yet you don't hear people typically warning about caveats on that site, even though they should!

 

It is indeed available in this new cleaned up form however it is really questionable why anyone would deliberately restrict their searches to just this one database and wouldn't include the other newly indexed data from original sources for BMD that they have added. Most of these are the same quality or better than the original IGI and often fill in the gaps that the original IGI list had. It appears that they decided to add their full index collections as new sources in new batches and left the IGI as a "wither on the vine" option, an old dataset that is still there should you specifically want to reference it, but which appears to be significantly out of date compared to the fuller more detailed sources.

 

All the parishes/films included in the IGI are all slowly being reindexed often from better copies of the register or at least from better screens. Once your county of interest is represented in the Historical Records Collection, that's a much better starting point than the IGI (though note there are currently some counties with images for browsing but no transcriptions). List for England.
Note some images are only available to members of the LDS or at LDS libraries. Others are available to all free at home. Others are linked to pay sites like FindMyPast.

 

Family Search has a whole new look and have brought their Family Tree to the foreground.
I'm slowly finding my way around it.
In the centre top of the home page are
Family Tree Photos Search
Search takes you to a Search page which is rather like the last home page they had.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you can go straight to collections or start a search and refine it on the results page with the options to narrow by collection or place or date etc in the left panel below the basic search criteria.
This page also has the link to the Catalogue.

Harder to find is the Wiki with it's growing collection of information.
I've just discovered that if you click on Live Help under the picture on the front page, on the picture itself next to a button that says Get Help, there is a little link to Wiki.
Next to that is a link to videos where in the Learning Centre there is a growing list of video tutorials. I don't know what they're like.
If you click Live Help, it's much harder to find the link to the Wiki. It's buried down the page.

 

Hmm more tablet friendly. Hmmmm!!

Looks like I'll have to re-write my automated search function AGAIN!!!

 

They have changed round the search pages again. Doing that search I can only find one of their children.

 

Keep in mind though that a lot of records don't have mother's maiden names, the records in England being spectacularly bad at recording a maiden name, given the old convention that the wife effectively became the property of the husband. So for some countries a parent search isn't great due to there being far too many John Smith's married to a Mary something. In those countries where the convention was different and the wife retained her maiden name, often reverting to it after becoming a widow, we have a better chance of a decent result with a parent search. Unfortunately its the luck of the draw where your family hails from. You might even be lucky as some English parishes recorded a maiden name it was down to the individual scribe. Convention is that you get father's name and mother's forename.