Using FamilySearch
How to make good use of FamilySearch
www.tree-sleuths.co.uk
This is a blog about using FamilySearch, the free to use online genealogy website created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) which is at www.familysearch.org. Everybody who pursues genealogical research will, at one time or another, have heard of FamilySearch. Many of them dismiss it out of hand, and consequently miss out on the real treasure it holds.
There are no two ways about it, this is a colossal website. It can be quite intimidating to use on first seeing it; some people just keep to the (small) part they know and never discover some of the valuable information to be found there.
In a nutshell, what is FamilySearch?
FamilySearch is several things rolled into one. It is (1) an underlying archive of images original records and other resources, which have been used to create (2) a database of searchable derived records which in turn have been used together to create (3) a single huge family tree. Sitting beside these are (4) a genealogical research wiki (encyclopedia) and (5) a community of people with an online forum to ask and answer questions.
The original records were created by members of LDS who photographed original documents that they were given access to, going back for decades. Please note that they were not given access to all records, so don’t expect to find everything here. For example, in my neighbourhood in the UK, they were not permitted to photograph original Parish Registers so had to make do with Bishop’s Transcripts. This photography work continues to this day.
Over the years many of these images have been indexed by individuals who write down what they read in the images. This is ongoing work and a lot remains to be done. It is important to remember that this work is done by volunteers, some of whom may not always keep to strict genealogical standards.
Individual website (see later) users can then add people to the Family Tree. Unfortunately the accuracy of the details that they added is not always checked, with the result that incorrect relationships or lifetime facts have crept into the Family Tree. More worrying, for me anyway, is that any user can change the existing tree.
So the most reliable information is (1) the images of original records, followed in terms of reliability by (2) the searchable database, and followed by (3) the Family Tree.
The research wiki contains a vast range of useful resources providing supporting reference information and context. Being a wiki this is maintained by a community of contributors.
Finally there is the community and its forum. Here users can ask each other questions they have been able to answer by looking in the wiki, or for help and suggestions about brick walls. Remember that most of the users on the forum are just ordinary hobbyist genealogists, so always check what they may tell you.
Where do I start?
Before you can use the site you need to create a free account there. Click on the create account button at top right of the landing page. If you are worried you might receive unsolicited communications you can put your mind at rest - in all the time I have had an account I have never received a communication I did not explicitly ask for.
Once you have created an account and logged in, the five parts of FamilySearch can be found:
1 is reached through the search|catalog menu
2 is reached through the search|records menu
3 is reached through the search|family tree menu, or the family tree menu
4 is reached through the search|research wiki menu
5 is at community.familysearch.org
This blog post will address each of these five areas. For ease of understanding it will look at (3) first, followed by (2), then (1). After that attention will turn to (4). The community (5) will come last. It will help your understanding if you have the website, www.familysearch.org, open at the same time as you read this blog so you can experiment as you go along.
3 The FamilySearch Family Tree
Many people think this is all that FamilySearch is. The Family Tree focuses on the people of the past and presents their vital information and who they were related to. Over many years many different contributors have added people to the tree, sometimes including detailed information about the documents (see (2) and (1) below) that show when and where the person existed, but sadly at other times not including this information.
My experience looking at the Family Tree suggests that more recently people have become more aware of the importance of “showing your working” and the standard is improving.
Start by picking an ancestor of yours, later 19th century seems to give a good hit rate, and type their name into the search box that appears when you click search|family tree. I searched for Henry Leeson Bunn, who was my great-great uncle.
FamilySearch Family Tree - Search Box
A list of database hits is returned. Note that these include, at the top, people from the Family Tree who exactly match the search name, and lower down people who partially match.
- On the left of each entry a little icon shows whether the person was male (blue) or female (pink).
- Next comes their full name as recorded in the tree, year of birth and death, and an enigmatic looking reference (like ABCD-EFG) which uniquely identifies this person in the Family Tree - every person in the Family Tree has a different reference code. Please be aware that it is possible for the same person to have been (mistakenly) added to the Family Tree multiple times by different contributors. In such a case each will have a different unique identifier even though they relate to the same real person. Correcting these duplications is a never ending task for contributors.
- There is then a column headed “events”. All the vital information that was entered by the contributor is listed here, such as birth or death.
- The final column is titled “relationships”. This shows which other people in the Family Tree are linked to this person, based on their unique identifiers and the relationships that contributors have entered into the Family Tree.
At the top of the screen there are buttons to quickly filter this list by sex, birth place and year, marriage place and year, death place and year, other place and year, and residence place and year.
My search for Henry Leeson Bunn returned over 188,000 hits. Fortunately the man himself was at the top of this list, but this won’t always be the case. Narrowing things down is what the right hand side of the screen is for. Here there are two tabs, one for searching by the person’s name, and one for searching by the unique identifier.
When searching by name, you can add things like birth location and date to the search - the results will start with all people in the tree who match Name AND Event 1 AND Event 2 AND … followed by people who almost match. Perhaps surprisingly, the total number of records returned is no smaller than before, but they are presented in a different order which, you will hope, more closely identifies the person you are looking for.
Since this search is looking at the Family Tree you can also look for things like Henry Leeson Bunn whose father was Henry Joshua Bunn.
To reiterate, the information the Family Tree presents to you is only as accurate as what contributors added to the tree, so may simply be wrong. For example, in the case of Henry Leeson Bunn his wife is named as Elizabeth Harriet Bunn, and her maiden name Grimadell is nowhere to be seen.
In addition to searching the Family Tree for people you can also add people to the tree, or edit people who already exist in the tree.
If you want to add a person to the Family Tree, please only do this after checking that the person you want to add is not already in the Family Tree. It is not obvious how to do this so:
- select any menu item in the Family Tree menu
- click on Recents in the menu bar of the screen that appears
- at the bottom of the drop down click on Add Unconnected Person.
Now just fill in the details of the person you want to add in the dialog box that opens. You may wonder why this dialog box allows you to add a new person by entering a unique identifier - actually this function does something different, it instead finds the person with that unique identifier and allows you to edit their details. Important though this capability may be, it means that anybody can change information that you may have added to the Family Tree; for this reason I do not recommend using the FamilySearch Family Tree to hold your personal family’s family tree.
That’s it for the Family Tree.
2 The FamilySearch database
This is where it starts to become a bit more daunting, but is in fact much more useful than the Family Tree. This database contains information that has been extracted from original documents that recorded vital personal information about people in the past. It does not aim to identify real people (unlike the Family Tree), but instead focuses on where (in which documents) a person’s name can be found. It is then your job to show that the document relates to the person you are researching, and not to somebody else with the same name.
Again, search for the same ancestor as above, but this time in the screen that opens when you hit search|records. Again I searched for Henry Leeson Bunn.
A very similar list appears as we saw when using search|family tree, but there are some important differences. The list again starts with accurate hits and moves on to near misses. In the case of Henry Leeson Bunn 179,000 hits are returned, and his precise name appears twelve times instead of just once with search|family tree. The difference from the Family Tree is that in principle each of these twelve identical names could belong to a different real world person, and this would not be the result of any duplication in the database but instead would show that many different people with that name really existed. In the Henry Leeson Bunn example, however, I know that these twelve hits are indeed all the same person.
- Under the person’s name it states which original document this person’s name was found in (the source), together with whether this person was the main subject of the record.
- The second column shows what piece of information is recorded about this person in that source (this is similar to a citation but often insufficiently precise). If a relationship to another person can be deduced from the document then that relationship should be shown in the third column.
- Finally there are a number of icons that can appear, and which you can click on:
- Document - a transcription of the content of the original document
- Camera - a digital image of the original document if it is available. Sometimes this may be a link to another site which may or may not require payment to see the image.
- Head and shoulders - allows you to compare these details found in the database with details of a person found in the Family Tree, and to attach those details (or parts of them) to a person in the Family Tree.
- A family tree schematic - takes you straight to a person in the Family Tree where it was recorded in the Family Tree that the person’s information came from this document. The person who added this information can be contacted if need be.
At the top of the screen there are buttons to quickly filter the results by sex, birth, marriage, death, other event, or residence. Some of the source documents record the person’s race so you can filter by this too. This time the total number of records returned is much less than the full list.
You can also narrow down the results by using the collection button to limit the search to only certain kinds of document. So if you want to know about court records you can limit the search to Probate & Court.
If the quick filters don’t do what you need, the panel on the right of the screen is your friend. Just as with the Family Tree search, you can add events and relatives to your search with the same effect of searching for Name AND Event 1 AND Event 2 AND Relative 1 AND …
You can also narrow the search by effectively specifying which exact source document in the FamilySearch records to look in (Batch Number, Image Group Number, Film Number). This will be explained in more detail in the next section.
1 The FamilySearch Catalog
As I noted right at the start of this blog, underlying the FamilySearch database there is a huge archive of images of original documents (and also books and other materials). The FamilySearch Catalog is a catalog of what is in this archive. Some of what is in the archive has been indexed, manually, and this index information is what you can find in the FamilySearch Database.
If what you are looking for has not been indexed then the only way see see what it contains is to find the exact image from the underlying archive. This may seem a daunting task, especially given the almost unimaginable number of images held in the archive, but fortunately this is a very useful catalog that helps you find what you need.
Start by clicking on the Search|Catalog menu item. The first thing to note in the screen that opens is that you can search by a number of different ways depending on what you already know.
Searching by Surname will tend to find books, some of which can be viewed online. For example, searching for Mohun returns (among others) a book which mentions the surname Mohun in its text (“Ancestors of Captain Anthony Collamer…”). Clicking on this opens a (long) details page with a link near the bottom (camera icon) to a digitised version of the book.
Searching by Title will find all items which are recorded in the Catalog with that word in the title. In this case searching for Mohun returns a much shorter list consisting of a history of Dunster, which is a book in two volumes , and an old legal document.
You can also search by the Author of the document (if known). This means the name of a person and also means the name of the organisation that originally created the item, like a specific parish. For example, if you search for Maker, one item is Church of England, Parish Church of Maker (Maker is a parish in Cornwall).
It is worth trying a few searches by Subject or Keywords - these are a bit harder to guess in advance so a little practice is called for. For example searching for Register by Subjects returns only 18 items, but searching the same by Keywords returns hundreds of thousands.
A very good search is by Place. As you enter the name of a place, the search engine displays a list of every place it knows of that matches what you have types so far, so you can click on the exact one you want. In my case, searching for Maker prompts with England, Cornwall, Maker (the place I want) and also places like Makerstoun in Scotland. The list returned is a list of all the types of documents that are held for that place; clicking on each type reveals the individual documents of that type.
FamilySearch Catalog - Search by Place Results
A quick aside on the documents in the archive and how to record exactly which document you have seen or need to see. When you click through to the details page for a single document the top of the page shows you exactly what, within the LDS archives/libraries the document is. Remembering that this is often a microfilm of an original document, this is followed by information about what that original document was and where to find it. Finally, if the item in the LDS archives is a digital image the Film Number and/or Image Group Number is given; it’s important for you to write this down because that is the best shortcut back to the item and other people/websites will usually cite this number.
At the end of each line there are some clickable icons.
A Magnifying Glass means the content of this items has been indexed and you can search that index for people’s names and such. This index is the FamilySearch Database we looked at above.
A Camera Icon on its own means you can view the microfilm as a digital image on your own computer. For example, the Maker parish registers for 1869-1906 are viewable this way.
A Camera Icon with a Key over it means you can view the microfilm images but only at an LDS Family History Centre. For example, the Wesleyan births and baptisms for Brandon in Suffolk for 1811-1836 can only be viewed at an FHC.
Other icons mean the document is not available in a digital form.
Finally you can search for a specific film/image group number if you have that information from an earlier search or from a citation you have found elsewhere. As a rule of thumb, if any source you are looking at, whether in FamilySearch or on other websites, has a FHL Film Number, always write it down.
These archive images are subject to different copyright/reproduction rights depending on who owns the original documents. Sometimes you will be able to view the images at home and download them. Sometimes you will not be able to download them. Sometimes you can only view them on a computer in an LDS Family History Centre.
A worked example
Let’s look at a worked example of using FamilySearch to identify a person.
I have an ancestor called John Bunn who was born in 1809-1810 in Harwich in Essex (I know this from census records). I don’t know who his parents were, but in the 1841 census he was living next door to another John Bunn and his wife Rosamond in the Lakenham parish of Norwich, both of whom were born in Norfolk. Were these his parents?
Start by looking in the FamilySearch Family Tree, just in case somebody else may have already added him. Looking for John Bunn, born Harwich in 1809-1810 does not find him, so we will need to work harder to solve this.
Next look in the FamilySearch Database, with the same search terms. This finds a couple of census entries (which I already have) but no record around 1809-1810. So we will have to look harder still.
Next we will need to use the FamilySearch Catalog. But which of the many documents should we read through? Remember that his birth was pre-1837 (the start of Civil Registration) so there will be a record of his baptism, not his birth. Also remember that a baptism does not need to happen close to the birth location or birth date, although it usually does. Finally we know we will have to look at the original images because his baptism wasn’t indexed (it did not turn up in the FamilySearch Database).
And the search? If John and Rosamond were his parents then there should be a record of a John Bunn baptism with parents John and Rosamond.
In the 1841 census two young women called Elizabeth and Charlotte Bunn were living in John and Rosamond’s household, so let’s make the assumption that these were their daughters and see if we can find baptism records for girls with these names and parents John and Rosamond. Searching in the FamilySearch Database for Elizabeth Bunn with mother Rosamond returns a baptism on 24 Jan 1813 in Heigham Norfolk (close to Norwich) with parents John and Rosamond Bunn; searching for Charlotte gives a baptism 20 Dec 1818 in Norwich with father John Bunn. These are looking promising, and suggest searching for John Bunn’s baptism near Norwich and in 1810s or even 1820s. Sure enough there is one in the FamilySearch Database: John Bunn baptised 25 Dec 1822 in Norwich with parents John and Rose.
That’s a big difference between birth in 1809-10 and baptism in 1822. Could these two John Bunns (birth and baptism) be the same person? How could we prove this?
The answer lies in those images of original records.
Clicking on the details link for this FamilySearch Database result reveals that the baptism took place at St John’s, Maddermarket, Norwich. Which images in the archive are of the Baptism Register for St John’s, Maddermarket in 1822?
Open the FamilySearch Catalog and search for Author Maddermarket. The result is a short list. There are Parish Registers for 1558-1928 but unfortunately the period covering 1822 is not digitised (there is no camera icon).
Maybe there are Bishop’s Transcripts available? Bishop’s Transcripts can be found in Diocesan or Archdeaconry Archives; if FamilySearch has images of these, which archive were they photographed in?
This is where the FamilySearch wiki comes in. It has an interactive jurisdictions map at www.familysearch.org/mapp which tells us that the Diocese for this parish was Norwich. So now search in the FamilySearch Catalog for Author Norwich. A long list is returned, but near the top we find the Archdeaconry of Norwich, which holds Bishop’s Transcripts. We are interested in Parishes L-N 1822, which is film 1278883 Items 1-2. Click on the camera icon next to this and there, Image 341 of 387, is (a copy of) the original parish baptism register entry for John Bunn.
That’s not enough on its own to prove this is our John Bun, but there is more. Looking closely there is a margin note that seems to read “Born Harwich Essex […] 23rd 1810”.
Bingo. So this John Bunn, christened in 1822 in Norwich with parents John and Rose Bunn, is the same man who was born in 1809-1810 that we started with. We could not have proved that without this image.
[FindMyPast (£) has a much better image of the original register where this writing is completely clear.]
4 The FamilySearch Research Wiki
Just in case you are not familar with them, a wiki is a digital encyclopedia covering a chosen subject whose content is created and maintained by a community of users. The FamilySearch Research Wiki concentrates on the subject of genealogy. It does not contain names and dates of the people you will be researching. Instead it tells you where to go to find that information.
Click on Search|Research Wiki. You will see that the default way of searching the wiki is by location, but you can also enter topics and words that may appear in page titles. I have chosen to look at St John Maddermarket in Norwich. You will see that the Bishop’s Transcripts we looked at above are listed there - they are much easier to find by using this wiki than by the approach above.
Note also the link “England Jurisdictions 1851 map”. This is the map we used above. Although this does not lead to FamilySearch Database or Catalog records, it does help you identify which old courts and local archives to look in when trying to find old documents about a place. It’s invaluable.
5 The FamilySearch Community
Finally, the FamilySearch Community. This is at community.familysearch.org, just in case you had forgotten. This has a number of parts, which I will deal with one by one, that hold many thousands of discussions.
There is a search box at the top of the page. This will usually return too many hits to be immediately useful, but (just like in other parts of the FamilySearch website) there are quick filters to narrow down to discussions, places, and events, and also by title, author, and date of discussion contribution.
a FamilySearch Help
Just as it says in the title, these discussions are about how to use the FamilySearch website. Some are more general (eg General Questions, and FamilySearch Account) and others are aimed at a particular audience (eg Temple - ask about the temple features on FamilySearch). This is the first place to start with any query you may have that was not answered by this blog post.
b Groups
There are a number of groups for likeminded people to hold more ringfenced discussions around particular topics. Some of them are research groups, focussing on family names or places. There are also some that focus on tools and techniques such as Family History Research Strategies, or Getting Started with FamilySearch (which like an expanded interactive version of this blog).
Overall, though, there are not many groups, and no way to create a new one directly
c Suggest an Idea
There is also a section called “Suggest an Idea” where users of the FamilySearch website can suggest new features for the Family Tree. It is not intended to be used for general feedback or bug reports.
To be completely honest, I have not really found this community to be useful for me. Most content here is related to the FamilySearch Family Tree, and you already know my views on that. Having said that, I recognise that the Community _would_ be useful for beginning users of the FamilySearch website, who initially would not know of all the website’s functionality or who may be intimidated by the sheer quantity of data that is available. I can only suggest you try it and see.
Winding down
If you are reading this it means you have stayed the course through this long blog, well done! But there is only so much that can be covered in a single blog post, so if you have specific questions not covered here, FamilySearch has its own blog dedicated entirely to how to use FamilySearch which is located at https://bit.ly/Tree-Sleuths-FS.
Happy Tree Sleuthing!
Julian Luttrell
The Tree Sleuths, 2022. The Tree Sleuths website.
Comments
Post a Comment