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Genealogy databases

The major genealogy databases are Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and FindMyPast. All have international record sets and are overlapping, but all have some unique collections.

First some general principles about databases.

Our ancestors left many records during their lives, whether they realized or intended to. But here’s the critical caveat — while most of those records survived (yes, even most Holocaust records), and many billions of documents have been digitized and are online, they are estimated to represent only 10-15% of all genealogical records.

That means the vast majority of existing records are either not digitized and/or not online. Even if they are online, that doesn’t mean they have been indexed — only indexed documents show up in search results. I hope to do a future column on accessing records that are not online, in county clerk offices, archives, libraries and other repositories.

Many beginners start their ancestral searching by going right to the major databases and plug names into search engines. I get it — I did that too my first few years of searching. And if they don’t find what they are looking for, they give up in frustration, assuming the records don’t exist.

Or, the opposite may happen, where we get back thousands of results. But not wanting to wade through many dozen pages of Isadore Cohens listings without know how to find their great-grandfather Izzy, I’ve seen many people reach the same frustration level, and give up.

I don’t mention this to discourage you, but rather to give you a deeper understanding of the nature of databases. The more you understand collections and databases, the more effective your search will be.

For instance, on the largest free database of records, FamilySearch, the majority of documents have not been indexed — mostly because they rely on volunteers to index key pieces of information (i.e. name, date, location, etc.).

Ancestry also has many unindexed records, although they pay their indexers. Both organizations are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) to enable computers to index records. More records can be indexed more quickly, but there are often more mistakes — and you should be aware of that when you use any database search engine.

There are still ways to find those unindexed records (another future topic), but they won’t appear in your search engine results, and many people would assume they are not online. Nonetheless, billions of documents have been digitized and indexed and should be searched.

So what are in the databases? 
 Collections on the major databases include — depending on the company or organization— vital records (birth, marriage and death records), censuses (federal, state, territorial), military records (draft registrations, muster lists, pensions files, hospital and medical records, service records, company diaries and records) church records (rarely synagogue records), immigration records, city directories, newspapers, land records — and much more.

A reminder that while Ancestry is a paid subscription site, most public libraries have an institutional subscription — meaning it’s free for cardholders. Usually, a library’s website will say if they have a subscription, along with other genealogical resources.

One catch is you can only access the free subscription on the library’s computers. During the worst part of the pandemic, Ancestry loosened its restrictions, and allowed library cardholders to access the institutional subscription from home. Many of those measures are lifted, but call your library to verify.

Millions of records are being added each week, so you should be searching on a regular basis.

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