Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org Search Tips

Hello everyone! How’s your week going? I’m excited to be with you for another week! Have you ever searched on Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org and they show you a hundred or thousand search results? It can be very overwhelming! Let me tell you about a little known feature on both of them that has helped me be a better and faster researcher.

Ancestry.com

Card Catalog

Some of you may know all about this feature on Ancestry, but I bet many of you haven’t. The card catalog is one of my favorite features. It is a gathering place on Ancestry of all of their record collections. It’s found under the Search button on the top toolbar. When you click on it, then it brings you to a place where you can either type in a title or a keyword. I usually go to the keyword section because I don’t know the exact title.

I type in Sweden or one of the other Scandinavian countries and it pulls up every record collection it has stored away. Ancestry gives you the title of the collection, where it is found such as immigration & travel, and how many records are in that collection. Many collections are in Swedish, but others are in English. There are many stories, memories, and histories found here in one spot as well.

Once you click on a title, for example Sweden, Emigration Registers, 1869-1948, you can then type in your ancestor’s information. Also, if you’re unsure that this collection will work for your ancestor, then scroll all the way to the bottom and it will give a summary of what you will find in this collection. I’ve weeded many collections this way. The title sounds like what I needed, but I decide against using it after reading the summary. If this collection works for you, then try to see if your Scandinavian ancestor is in there. This way helps narrow the search by a lot. You’re now searching only that collection instead of the thousands of collections by doing a general search at Ancestry’s home page.

FamilySearch.org

Catalog

Family Search has a similar feature. However, they have one advantage over Ancestry. Their “card catalog” is the actual Family History Library where all of the books, maps, papers, microfilm, microfiche, etc. is physically stored. They then put a digital link on their website where you can find all of their collections for a certain place or country.

Under the Search button, click Catalog and it will bring you to their collections page. You don’t want to type in your ancestor’s information here. What you want instead is to type their place information. So if your ancestor came from Kalmar County, Sweden, then type in that county. If you know the county, parish, and farm, then that would be even better because then you could narrow your search even more. So once you have that place pulled up, you will see all of the collections that FamilySearch has for that place. They may have church records, censuses, biographies, gazateers, maps, court records, etc. all for one place.

All you have to do is sift through the collections and find those that work for your ancestor. Some collections you can search online while others will only be available at the Library. So it’s just another way to search for your ancestor instead of always relying on the general search on their homepage. Neat, huh?

Professional researchers definitely use this tool because it saves them time. They don’t have to search every collection page by page. They can go straight to the source.

Summary

Aren’t these two sites amazing! Just think, this is just one feature that they have. Imagine how your genealogy journey would change as you learned how the other features worked. Next week, I plan on talking more about how to search in other ways with these two sites.

In the meantime, go check out the Card Catalog feature and the Catalog library at these places. You might surprise yourself with what you will learn from them. Don’t give these features just one try. Use them multiple times until you feel comfortable with them.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Tiffany

P.S. If you need more help, I research for people all of the time. I would love to have a 30 minute free consultation with you.