Hidden treasures in FamilySearch

You may use FamilySearch by typing your search terms into the inviting-looking box on the home page, and then filtering the results. I sometimes do that, but most of the time I prefer to locate a specific resource and search within it. One of the main reasons for this is that I can keep track of what I have searched, and by extension, what I haven't searched. I don't just do this on FamilySearch, it's my preferred way of doing any online research. So I usually scroll down to 'All record collections' and select one of the ten regions (count them - TEN).

Since I mainly research within British Isles records, I then go straight to 'United Kingdom and Ireland' - so far, so good, and there are about 100 record sets to choose from. But many Brits spent time out of the country, inconveniently marrying, having children or dying while overseas. Records of these events can be very hard to track down, as they might be in a variety of places (or not recorded at all). This kind of research is never going to be easy, but there are some some very useful records in FamilySearch, if you know where to look. If, instead of clicking on 'United Kingdom and Ireland' (or any other region) you go to 'All record collections' you will see, on the right, a full alphabetical listing from Alabama to Zimbabwe, and on the left under 'Place' a list of eleven regions (count them - ELEVEN).

As well as the geographical groupings that you saw on the home page, there is also a category called 'Other'. I just love categories called 'other', 'miscellaneous' or 'supplementary' and so on. They are just begging to be explored, you never know what you are going to find there. In this case you will see the Family Group Records Collection, Archives Section 1942-1969', the old IGI and three 'World Miscellaneous'collections - Births and Baptisms, Deaths and Burials,and Marriages. Not only 'Other' but 'Miscellaneous' too! Unfortunately there is no easy way of finding out what registers or record sets are included, as each description contains the customary 'Only a few localities are included and the time period varies by locality.' If you follow the 'Learn more' link there is a coverage list which gives a little more detail. This varies from 'Connecticut, New London' to 'China', but still leaves over 300,000 entries under 'World miscellaneous'.

Lacking any more helpful detail, I used my fall-back tactic of searching for a common name to see where the results come from. Predictably, there are quite a lot of Smiths, more than 2500 results, in fact. The results on the first page are from China, New Zealand and Romania. Some of the China entries contain the useful extra descriptive information 'British Consulate', but to find out the actual source you need to dig a little deeper. If you expand an entry you  may find some extra details, but the really useful one is the 'source film number', right at the bottom. This is enough to locate the  film you need at a FamilySearch Centre (or Center, depending on your continent) or the Family History Library but you want to know what you are going to be looking at, right?

You can find this out using the Library Catalog (or Catalogue, depending...etc) and I usually have this open in another window or tab to save time. Under 'Search for' select 'Film numbers' and away you go. I searched for film number 1494353 from a 1904 baptism entry in Bucarest,

There are two registers on this film, here is the full description of the second one, Consulate Registers 1851-1948:

By now you have done an awful lot of clicking, but it is well worth it, for any entry on FamilySearch, not just the 'Others'. The Notes section tells you where the original is held, and in this case it also gives the document reference. This is what you should include in your source citation, noting of course that at this stage you have looked at a (partial) transcript, and not the original. As I expected, these registers are in the Public Record Office - now The National Archives (TNA). The document references are helpful, FO 625/2-4, 6 if you want to view the originals at The National Archives,which may be more convenient for you than a FamilySearch Centre (it is for me, but then I work there!). I you are unfamiliar with the referencing system, the above is not a single reference but four - FO 625/2, FO 625/3 and so on. 

A number of Consulate Registers are indexed in FamilySearch, though by no means all of them, but I haven't figured out a sure-fire way of working out exactly which ones are included. The 'search-by-Smith' technique isn't guaranteed to find everything. I found these records by accident because I like exploring, and although you might find an entry for your ancestors using the 'Search everything then filter' method, you might not. 

Apart from the Consulate Registers there are some other useful resources for the British overseas, or at sea in these World Miscellaneous collections. There are lots of entries from the major collection of Church of England overseas chaplaincy registers, formerly held at Guildhall Library, but now at the London Metropolitan Archives  and much more besides. Why not have a look, who knows what you might find?    

New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part Three

Great Seal of Queen Anne 1707, commemorating the Act of Union of England and Scotland

Since my last post on this subject, I have been taking another close look at the collections in new FamilySearch that were formerly categorised as 'British Isles'. The fundamental problem with these records is that the place filters simply do not work. Unless this is sorted out, it will be very difficult for anyone searching British Isles records - England, Scotland, Ireland (North and South), Channel Islands, Isle of Man, or United Kingdom - to find what they are looking for, or even to know what is there to be searched in the first place. Some of the issues I have raised relate to this region, the one that I know best, but could apply equally to others; you can't filter by US state or Canadian province, which is just as bad as not being able to filter by county within the British Isles. But the way that the records here have been categorised is unique.

These lists don't match!

On the home page, scroll down to 'Browse by location' and select 'Europe'. You will see a list of 'countries' on the left, and a list of record collections on the right, in country order. The list of the left corresponds with the list on the right - up to a point. The list of countries on the left reads: Austria, Belgium, Channel Islands, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France ...and so on. The record collections mirror this exactly as far as Denmark, then the next collections are not from Finland, but England, which does not appear at all in the left-hand list.

The list on the left continues...Germany, Gibraltar, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland...but the right-hand list has Germany, Gibraltar, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy...etc. More record collections, this time for 'Great Britain' which have no counterpart on the left. The two lists continue in step almost to the bottom, where the last four countries listed on the left are Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom and Wales. Now if you look to the right-hand list of record collections, there is only Switzerland, Ukraine and Wales, the 'United Kingdom' record having been distributed, inaccurately, between England and Great Britain.

This discrepancy between countries and record collections ONLY occurs in relation to the British Isles records, and nowhere else in the whole of the Historical Records collections.

Collections in the wrong place

I have already mentioned some of the anomalies in my earlier posts, New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part One and Part Two. There is a filter for Wales, but it contains only Probate Abstracts 1773-1780; the major collections of Wales, Births and Baptisms, Wales, Marriages, and Wales, Deaths and Burials are found within the United Kingdom filter. Also within the United Kingdom are the Great Britain collections: Great Britain Births and Baptisms, Great Britain Marriages and Great Britain Deaths and Burials. I had looked at these before, and found that they included some Irish records - all of Ireland used to be part of the United Kingdom, and part of it still is, but it has NEVER been part of Great Britain. The Irish Sea is in the way! Great Britain is the geographical term for 'the other island' as one of my Irish friends calls it.

Further investigation shows that the baptism register of St Peter's, Athlone and Drum, Roscommon, is included in Great Britain Births and Baptisms, which contains the baptism register of the Immaculate Conception Chapel, South Orange, Essex New Jersey! I also found a number of entries there from the Irish Civil Registration indexes. Naturally, I have reported this using the Feedback facility.

Overseas Records

There are in fact many more records classified as 'Great Britain' which do not belong there. These are not records that have been mistakenly put in the wrong place by someone with an imperfect understanding of British geography. These come from substantial collections of records which are held in London, but whose whole point is that they record events that took place OUTSIDE the British Isles. These comprise many thousands of events recorded in British churches and chapels overseas, or registered with British consulates, embassies and legations abroad. The original records are held at The National Archives in either the Foreign Office or General Register Office collections, or in the Bishop of London's 'International Memoranda' at the London Metropolitan Archives. A further large  collection of births, marriages and deaths at sea, held at The National Archives, is also included in 'Great Britain' by FamilySearch.

These records are not just relevant to researchers with British Isles ancestry; they include people from all nations, particularly the 'At Sea' records which include many records of foreign nationals who were passengers or crew on British-registered ships. They may be included here because they are held in British archives, but records from the India Office Collection, held at the British Library, are correctly indexed by FamilySearch under India, so we know it can be done. Time to hit the Feedback button again...

New FamilySearch, a view from the British Isles Part Two

I have been having a closer look at New FamilySearch, with particular reference to the British Isles collections (even though the term 'British Isles' is no longer used as a place filter, see my earlier post on the subject). This time I have been looking at some of the collections themselves, and although these observations apply to specific collections in this region, the same kinds of features may well occur in records elsewhere.

I decided to look at the Scottish records, a very small collection compared with the inaccurately-defined 'United Kingdom' one.There are two record sets 'Scotland Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950' and 'Scotland, Marriages, 1561-1910' . The description of the first collection is rather vague

Index to selected Scotland births and baptisms. Only a few localities are included and the time period varies by locality. This collection contains 9,431,034 records. Due to privacy laws, recent records may not be displayed. The year range represents most of the records. A few records may be earlier or later.

You can scroll down the page for more information, or click on links that take you to the appropriate page in  the Research Wiki. There is a lot of useful information here, but it is all general rather than specific, and at no point is there list of the actual historical records that make up the collection. To be fair, the old FamilySearch did not provide this information eithe; the last time you could find such a list was in the Parish and Vital Records listing that came with the old microfiche editions of the IGI, and the last one of those was produced in 1992.

ADDENDUM: Chris Paton's comment below mentions the very helpful GENOOT site, so I have added the link here so that you can click on it instead of having to cut and paste. Cheers, Chris!

On the plus side, you can search the FHL catalog using the film number from any given entry and find details of the original source, which certainly was not always possible with the old FamilySearch. Furthermore, since the patron submissions from the IGI have been separated out, the source should now be an actual record that can be checked and evaluated. Or so I thought.

The date range 1564-1950 is very wide, and I guessed that the most recent entries would come from Civil Registration, known as the Statutory Registers in Scotland, so I did a search among the most recent entries to find out. This is another good feature of the new site, because you seem to be able to search on as many or as few fields as you wish, even a search on a date range of a single year, with no other fields filled in. Oe of the irritating features of the old site was getting a message  like 'You must enter at least a first or last name, or you must enter a father's full name and at least a mother's first name' 

A search in the range 1946-1950 returned 10 results, but only 4 of them were births from that period, the others were much earlier, but they included dates of DEATH that fell within the specified range. For the first time in my rummaging through new FamilySearch, I found that none of these entries included a film number, or any means of identifying the source. It may be that this information will be added later; I certainly hope so. But what I found more worrying was the fact that records containing death dates were in a collection called Births and Baptisms. The information shown is what you would expect to find on Scottish death certificates, except that the date and place of birth of the deceased do not appear in death entries during this period. So while these look like very informative records, I have no idea what I am searching.

I looked at the marriages next, and while the record descriptions were as vague as for the births and baptisms, there were film numbers that I could check in the FHL Catalog. I also discovered another advantage of new FamilySearch; it will return results from anywhere within the record being searched, which was not possible before. For example, a search for a man's name will not only return results for grooms of that name, but also where he is recorded as the father of the bride, which was an unexpected bonus. Not that this information appears in many Scottish marriage records before 1855, but it's wonderful when it does. Names of both parents of the bride and the groom appear from 1855 onwards, and marriages up to 1875 have been included in the IGI for many years, but only the brides' and grooms' names were included in the index. All the same, if post-1875 records are included later, or if the extra detail is ever added to the existing marriages, it's good to know that FamilySearch can cope with it.  It's nice to end on a positive note for a change.

I'll carry on exploring - and using the Feedback button of course - and report back again in a while