Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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The database with the most records is free

I hope your holidays were joyful and reflective. To start off the New Year, might I suggest spending time on searching for your ancestors? And here’s a place to do that.

I mentioned the largest free database in the world, FamilySearch.org (FS) in two of my previous columns, but I’d like to go into more depth with it now, because it’s a resource everyone who is serious about family history should be using.

FamilySearch has many features, but this column will only deal with the database, since it’s the most popular one. In future columns I hope to discuss their global Family Tree, and their wikis.

The FS website was created and is run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and has been around for quite some time.

The church has likely invested millions of dollars in genealogy, and its website is its most visible manifestation of that. They are the only religion in which family history plays such a major role.

For more than 75 years, the LDS church has been microfilming genealogical records from around the world and making them available. Contrary to popular opinion, these records have been accessible to anyone, and they are not only LDS records (after all, the LDS church is relatively young, founded in the early 18th century, and many LDS have non-LDS roots.) In fact, there are millions of Jewish records there, from Eastern Europe — more on that later.

So, you do not need to be a member of the LDS church to use this website, and there is no evangelizing nor religion on the website, although there is a link on there if you want to know more about the church. It should be noted that to effectively use the site, an account is required — but it is free, and helps with using the other features.

Virtually all those microfilmed documents have been digitized and put on their website. Although the LDS church doesn’t microfilm records anymore (it’s a dying format), teams of LDS missionaries continue to go worldwide and directly scan records.

As a result, there are roughly 15 billion records on the website, and that number is constantly growing, which means if you didn’t find something before, keep checking back. [This is the corrected number from my June 30, 2022 column, which gave an erroneous estimate.]

It’s important to know is that only about 35% of the FS records are indexed — FamilySearch relies on volunteers to index their records. If it’s not indexed, it won’t turn up in your search results.

What that means is that there’s a good chance your ancestor will turn up in a search in more common records (birth, marriage, death and immigration, and others), since they likely have been digitized and indexed. But for more obscure records, the chances are not so good.

I mentioned that there are millions of Jewish records on the FS site, but the catch is they are rarely translated into English. However, volunteers from JewishGen have transcribed and indexed key elements of those records, so a portion of them are accessible to us. You can search them on and if you can’t find them there, you can search FS.

Keep in mind that most Eastern European vital records are not like US records. Our records are more of a pre-printed form, giving vital information in blanks or boxes. Twentieth century and earlier EE records are often more in a paragraph form, and it takes knowledge of that language to find key facts, such as date, names, type of event, occupation, parents names, within what might be a half page or more of text.

While there is overlap between the record collections of major databases like Ancestry, FS and MyHeritage, each database has access to unique collections that makes it worthwhile to search.

Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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