The full-text search at FamilySearch is allowing many of us to make discoveries in local records that could only have been dreamed about years ago. That’s great and it is a wonderful service and a boon to genealogists. But there’s some catches that we need to be aware of as we sift through search results.
We are only searching what FamilySearch has.
And we’re not even searching all of what FamilySearch has.
And the full-text transcription of records is helpful, but it’s not perfect. There are errors and there may be references to your person of interest that you are not finding because of difficulties in reading and transcribing the script.
When you perform that full-text search at FamilySearch, do you know what records it includes for your county of interest? And if it includes court records, do you know which ones? Does FamilySearch have all the court records for a county or does it only have a portion of them?
If you don’t know what you are searching, then you don’t know what you are missing.
2 Responses
Excellent reminder to always be mindful of 1) what is actually being searched, 2) are there more records elsewhere to explore, 3) the results are only as good as the database being explored [the old adage comes to mind “garbage in, garbage out”].
So, if our full text search produces some results, we are wise to go through the process of questioning those results to come to accurate conclusions, as well as arriving at more complete biographies of our ancestor’s fascinating life stories.
There’s no doubt these searches facilitate the discovery of materials that would be been too time-intensive to find in the pre-digital era, but we’ve got to balance that with sound genealogy methods.