Have you tried out the Experimental Full-Text Search on Family Search? In this post, find out what you might be able to discover about your ancestors from using this free tool.
Family Search has a variety of experimental tools that we can use to enhance our family tree research. By using these experimental tools and providing feedback, we can help eventually improve the tools for ourselves and others.
The experimental tool that is the subject for this article is the Full-Text Search tool. This feature was released experimentally in 2024, and many thousands of records have been added to the collections since that date.
The way the tool works and the technology behind it is the reason that you might find it to be a very helpful tool in your genealogy toolbox. During my research for this article, I made several discoveries about people in my own family tree using the full-text search tool.
According to Family Search, their experimental tools are not guaranteed to always be available. So, be sure to try this one out as soon as you can.
How does this tool work?
The full-text search tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “read” and transcribe hundreds of millions of digitized, yet not yet indexed, historical records. The AI transcription makes the record searchable, meaning we can now type in keywords and search terms and find these records.
Prior to this tool, we would have had to manually search through images of records. I have personally spent dozens of hours doing this, and it is extremely difficult to tab through hundreds of pages of records, zoom in, and try to scan the page visually for names of people that I am looking for.
Since I am only human, I am sure that I have accidentally scrolled right past an entry that would have been useful to me. Sometimes it is hard for me to read cursive handwriting or faded text.
Fortunately, AI is not thus hindered. It does not get tired, and it can learn the intricacies of variations in handwriting much more quickly than I can.
Another big difference between the typical searchable indexes that we use and the AI-enabled full-text search tool is that the entire page is transcribed for search. This means that any text anywhere on the page might have your ancestor’s name on it, even if the record is not necessarily about your ancestor.
For example, the tool can be used to find your ancestors listed as witnesses in a marriage or as someone who previously owned a property that was being sold between two additional parties.
You’ll find a few more real-life examples about how this works further on in this article.
How to find this tool
You can find the Family Search Full-Text Search tool on the Family Search Labs page. I recommend that you create and login to your free account prior to visiting the labs page.
Once you are logged in, you can scroll through the tools until you see a feature that is described as a way to “Expand your search with Full Text”. Click the blue button to turn it on and try it, or click on the blue link “Go to experiment” to visit the landing page for the tool.
Clicking on the tool will take you to a landing page where you will see a search box. This is where you can enter in the search parameters to see what kind of information you can find about your relatives.
What can you discover?
While using the tool, I found many court records, deeds, insurance records, immigration and travel documents, as well as vital records, such as birth and marriage records. I picked a few examples of the information that I learned about my ancestors to share with you to help you see what you might find about yours.
- Affidavit of witness for my ancestor’s friend’s citizenship application
- Guardianship bond for my ancestor’s friend’s guardianship of minor child
- Citizenship record for great-great grandmother’s first husband
- Mortgage records for my 4th great-grandfather’s home in Newark, New Jersey
- Deed records for 3rd great-grandfather
- Passenger record for relatives of Slovak great-great grandfather, who listed him as the person who they were going to stay with
- My great-grandfather’s birth record entry in his county in Illinois
The image below is a portion of my great-great-great-great grandfather’s $325 mortgage that he took out for the house that he lived in for most of his married life. His wife is mentioned by name in the record, along with an alternative spelling of her name, which I also found to be very helpful.
This ancestor was born in Germany, and he immigrated to the United States just in time to be a solder in the civil war. It was very exciting to find one more record to piece together his life in the US.
One of the other items of special note that I found while searching was a passenger list that included my great-great grandfather’s name as the person who the travelers were going to be staying with in the US. The travelers were named Jan and Beta.
Since Jan and Beta were the travelers, their names may have been indexed by the human indexers who made a list of all of the people who traveled on the ship. However, since my great-great grandfather was not the main person who the record was about, his name would have not been indexed.
With the new full-text transcription that is made possible through automation, my ancestor’s name showed up in the full-text transcript.
Family stories held that Jan, my ancestor’s brother, came with his wife from Slovakia to live in the United States. The story went that he saved up enough money to buy a farm back in Slovakia and went home.
While this story was plausible enough, I had never been able to find evidence that he had actually come to the US. Since my ancestor’s name showed up on the full-text search tool, I was able to find this record and “prove” the family story.
Tips for using the full-text search tool
If you don’t find records for your ancestor while using the tool, there are a few things that you can try to see if they help.
- Try alternate spellings for your ancestors name, or searching with or without their middle name
- Change the date range
- Expand the location from narrow to broad (i.e. change it from “Newark, New Jersey” to simply “New Jersey”
- If you are getting too many results, try using quotations around keywords or your ancestor’s name (i.e. “Mark E. Smith” instead of Mark E Smith)
It’s also important to note that since AI is “reading” the records, they may not completely understand the handwriting. If you see a record in the results that seems like it might match, be sure to open it up and read it for yourself – you might make a big discovery this way.
Conclusion
I hope that this post has helped you understand a little about how to use the full-text search tool, and what kind of information you might be able to find while using it.
If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, or if you would like to share a discovery that you made about your family tree while using it, I would love to hear from you in the discussion below!
Do you think that this is a good use of AI? Let me know!
Thanks for reading today!