Temple and Family History Lesson 8: Research in Family Search

 

Temple and Family History Lessons

Lesson 8

Research in Family Search

 

The admonition from the Lord through the Prophet Joseph Smith is to “Seek after our dead”.  So far in these lessons we have reviewed how to record and preserve the evidences of our ancestors.  In this lesson we will look at the task of “seeking” them, or doing research.

Seeking out our dead involves looking for their names in records that generally were created during their lifetimes.  Many of life’s events result in a record being made.  Birth, starting and finishing school or other training, starting or changing employment, dealings of employment, land sales and purchases, major moves, marriage, divorce, military service, death, burial, all may be accompanied by some record creation.  Many such records are still in existence for about the last 400 years.  Before that time records are scarce and difficult to find. 

Organizations like Family Search and many others like them make it their business to collect old records, have them copied, and index them to make them electronically searchable.  Indexing refers to looking through the document and extracting names, dates, places and other genealogical information and putting it into an electronic database that can be searched by a computer.  It is in these indexed records that genealogical research is done using popular web sites such as Family Search and Ancestry.com.

Home Sources

Before searching indexed records we need some names, dates, and places to search for.  This starting information usually comes from home sources such as letters, Bibles, photo albums, saved documents, and remembered facts and stories.  We start with these home sources and as we progress through indexed records the home sources continue to surface and provide valuable hints.  Figure 1 is a sample of a common home source; a clipped obituary of my great grandmother that we found in the home of one of her daughters back in Iowa. 

Figure 1.  Obituary of Drucilla Jackson Butcher found in the home of one of her daughters.

Whoever clipped it out of the paper failed to include the heading from the newspaper page that would have given the date and name of the paper.  This is an almost universal oversight when people clip out of newspapers.  They never include the source.  Fortunately this clipping gives the date and place of death along with much valuable family information that we can follow up with on Family Search.

Regarding home sources, they all have short life expectancies.  When the older generation pass away the children often discard old records and photos, because no one remembers who they were about.  You need to intercept these collected documents before they get thrown out.   It is also important to visit with elderly relatives who may remember facts for which there will be no other clues. They will not be around forever.   It may be well worth the time and expense to take a vacation and visit living uncles, aunts and removed cousins and search their shoeboxes of old records and to copy or record their memories.  Keep in mind that often the memories of the very elderly are confused and incomplete, but valuable nevertheless when no other hints are forthcoming.

Searching from the Family Search “Person Page”

Now back to Family Search.  In the clipping above we have found the name and birth date of my great grandmother Drucilla Jackson.  There is enough information in the obituary to create a Person Page for Drucilla in Family Search, which has already been done.  But we would like to know more about Drucilla.  Perhaps the name of her mother or brothers or how and when she came from Missouri to Iowa.  Let’s go to her Person Page in Family Search and start our research there.

Figure 2 is a screenshot of Drucilla’s Person Page.   It already contains more information than was found in the obituary, but we can pretend that we are just starting to “Seek after” more of her information. 

Figure 2.  Drucilla Jackson’s Person Page with the Family Search research link highlighted.

The first link to look at on your relative’s  ‘Person Page’ is the “Research Help” link at the top of the right-hand column.  Family Search is constantly looking through it’s indexed records for all of the names submitted by users.  When it finds an instance of the name, or some very similar name, it adds that source to the Person Page under the heading “Research Help” as a hint.  The longer your name exists in the Family Search database the more of these “Hints” will accrue.   With these "Hints" Family Search is saving you the trouble of doing your own search for this person.

Unfortunately, our relative Drucilla Butcher has no such hints attached to her Parson Page but your person might, so be sure to look at this link.

Next notice the link highlighted in the red circle in the right-hand column of the page just below the Research Helps.  It is the first link under the heading “Search Records”.  We will return to the other links later.  The name of this first link is “Family Search” and it initiates a powerful search through Family Searches’ billions of indexed records looking for the name Drucilla / Francis / Jackson / Butcher.  The search engine will look for every occurrence of any of these names appearing with the connected places and dates that are included in the Person Page.  This would be essentially the same search that is automatically going on all the time behind the scenes in Family Search whose results are added to the “Research Helps” link mentioned above.  But in this individualized search you can specify different name spellings, date ranges, other places and relations that may not be presented in the Person Page.   

We actually used this research tool back in Lesson 7 when we were adding a Family Search source to the Person Page of my 2^nd great grandmother, Mary Peck.   We are invoking this search engine again to see if there are any indexed records in the Family Search database that might contain information about Drucilla.  Figure 3 is the resulting display of the first of 753 records found connected with the names and places for Drucilla.

Figure 3.  Results of search from Drucilla’s Person Page.

The records that best fit the data provided on Drucilla’s Person Page are shown at the top of the list of 753 records.  And in this case, the first entry is the only one that looks like it pertains to our Drucilla.  It is an entry from the 1880 US Census for Wright County, Missouri.   According to the obituary this is the county where Drucilla was born in 1873.  Her father’s name was David Butcher which is the reported name of her father in the census.   There is one discrepancy in this record.   Drucilla’s birthday as reported in the obituary was 5 June 1873.  The census was taken on June 15^th of 1880, she should be 7 years old in the census enumeration.  But remember that the birthdate shown in the obituary is highly secondary, that is, it is being reported many years after the actual event took place, and by a person, probably a daughter, who was not there when Drucilla was born.  It also could have been printed incorrectly by the newspaper.  In any case census records are notoriously bad in reporting ages, and a few days error in dates is almost insignificant.   Figure 4 is a photo of the original enumeration.  This definitely is Drucilla’s family in 1880.

Figure 4.  Photo of original 1880 Census Wright Co., MO.

We will want to save this record to Drucilla’s person page as explained in Lesson 7.  It contains much new information.  We now know Drucilla’s mother's first name (William was and still is an unusual given name for a female), her parents approximate ages, and the names and approximate ages of her two brothers.  We also know her father’s occupation and the birth states for each member of the family and for her grandparents. 

Don’t forget, as was mentioned in Lesson 7, to open the image of the original census enumeration and search a few pages before and following the page with your ancestors to see if there were related families living close by. 

We see in the obituary and in the 1880 census records that Drucilla’s father was David Butcher, born around 1845 also in Missouri.  Assuming we have no Person Page yet for him, let’s invoke the Family Search engine by another means.

Searching from the Family Search Home Page

Return to the Family Search home page by clicking on the green Family Search icon at the upper left corner of the page.  Figure 5 shows this home page with the menu option “Search” circled on the horizontal menu at the top of the page.  When you click on this “Search” link a second menu immediately opens just beneath the link.  This lower menu offers a number of possible types of records that can be searched.  We will click on the uppermost selection; “Records”. 

Figure 5.  Initiating a search of records from the home page.

Clicking on the choice, “Records”, brings up a box where we can enter a name, date, and place of any person we might be interested in.  Let’s enter David Butcher, born in Missouri, date range 1840 to 1850.  After entering this information we click on the blue “Search” link at the bottom left corner of the page and wait just a few seconds for Family Search to look through its billions of indexed records.  The search results are then displayed on a results page as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Results of Home Page search for David Butcher.

There are five entries on this first page of results that look like they refer to our David Butcher.  The first is the 1880 Census entry that we have already seen when we searched for the daughter, Drucilla.  The other four (the last two are duplicates, I don’t know how that happens) are entries from the 1870, 1860, and 1850 US censuses. 

In 1850 we find David as a youth in his father’s home, David Senior.  This gives us some of young David’s brothers and sisters.  Based on other family records and a printed family history we know that these are David’s siblings and this is the right family.  

In 1860 we see that David and some of his siblings are living with “Betsy”, who does not appear in earlier records.  David Senior has recently died and the children are apparently with their step mother.  

In 1870 our David is married and has his first son, William.  Here is a case where searching a few pages in the photocopied census enumeration in front of and behind the family we found yielded the home of David’s brother, Ransom Butcher.

With these four census records, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880, we can add David’s three children to his Person Page and we can create a Person Page for his father, David, Sr., with approximate dates and names of children.  This takes us one generation farther back in seeking out our ancestors.  The image for the 1850 census is shown in Figure 7.  Young David is only seven years old.

Figure 7.  1850 Census entry for David Butcher Sr.

With just this one search we have added two families to our tree (David Jr. and David Sr.), and temple work can be performed for those children whose names appear in these records.  But the birth dates are approximate and more complete names and marriage information would be desirable, so we might wait for more sources giving confirmation of these names and dates or new facts before submitting these names for temple ordinances based only on the census.

By the way, especially when searching census records, if no matches are found in your first search, reset the search using asterisks as wild cards in the name.  You might start by replacing all the vowels in the name with asterisks.  This will tell Family Search to return all the names that use the consonants from your name, which will include a much large collection.  This is particularly important search technique because volunteer indexers may be inexperienced at reading early handwriting and census enumerators were often poor spellers with poorer penmanship.

We will look at possible further searches that can be made from Family Search, but first, what should we do with these good sources that have been discovered?

We initiated this search for David Butcher with the assumption that we had not yet created a Person Page for him.  Without a Person Page we cannot save the records specifically to David Butcher.  But we can save them to our record Source Box, then create the Person Page for David, and one for his father, David Sr., by adding their names to Drucilla’s Person Page, and then add the sources from our Source Box to the new Person Pages.  We looked at how to do this in Lesson 7.   Once the sources are saved in our Source Box it is simple to add them to the Person Page of each child listed in these census records as we add them to the tree and create their Person Pages.

Further Searches

Family Search is constantly adding more indexed records to their database, so it is wise to every so often conduct a new search for ancestors we are working on, perhaps every six months or less.  Some new record added to the collection may yield new facts.

Another place to look within Family Search is the “Research Wiki”.   Figure 8 shows the location of the link to open this page.  It is at the bottom of the menu under “Search” in the upper menu bar.

Figure 8.  Opening the Research Wiki in Family Search.

The Research Wiki is self explanatory.  Figure 9 shows the opening Wiki page where you can select a particular location or a type of record you want to search.  In the case of David Butcher, Jr. we might select North America, United States, state of Missouri, and Wright County.   

Figure 9.  Wiki opening page.

These selections will open a long page of historical information about Wright County, Missouri.  Many record sources will be identified, some available on the Family Search site and many others on other genealogical record sites.  We see in the facts given for Wright County Courthouse Records, for example, that the courthouse was destroyed or burned seven times between 1849 and 1897, so not many county records exist, such as births, marriages, and deaths, until after 1897.

You can specify many searches from this Wiki page for one county.  Many selected searches will open in a new tab on your computer, but to be sure not to lose the Wiki page you are using, it is a good idea to always “Right Click” on the record link that you want to open, and then select “Open link in new tab”.  This will allow you to easily return to the Wiki source page (tab) after consulting the particular source link.  Do this whenever you need to leave a page that you may want to return to in the near future.

Non-Indexed Records

Having introduced the Research Wiki above, this is a good point to mention non-indexed records.  Over 70% of the record images available to users of Family Search, including probably most of those found in the Research Wiki, are not yet indexed.  This means you can browse through these records looking for your people but you may have to look through hundreds of images to find one of them.  Unfortunately the huge influx at Family Search of photographed pages of records from around the world greatly exceeds the number of those pages that can be indexed in a timely way even by the hundreds of volunteer indexers around the world who help with this critical work.  

In addition to the Research Wiki many of these un-indexed records can be located by clicking on the “Catalog” link just a few lines above the “Wiki” link shown in Figure 8, and searching for a geographic location.  “Name” searches only work when applied to indexed records.

Occasionally, by good fortune, a county or town clerk will have created his or her own index to that town's or county’s vital records and that hand-written index may appear in the first few pages of the photographed record or in a separate document that has also been filmed by the church.  In these cases, by consulting this hand-written index, you can quickly discover whether your person is mentioned in the record without having to go through and search every page of the record.

Even if there is no index, if you have an accurate date for your relative’s entry, you may be able to go directly to that date in the record and search a much smaller section of the photographed images.  In any case, be prepared to spend many hours searching through non-indexed records looking for your people.  Thirty years ago this was the only way there was to search records. So you are just going a little back in time.  Your computer screen is still much easier to read from than a squeaky old, unfocused, microfilm reader!

Again, the great majority of records available on Family Search are un-indexed.  In a later lesson we will look at some examples of searching these records.

Using Partner Web Sites.

One more search tool available on Family Search is the choice of using the Partner Sites.  These partner sites are Web Sites that have agreed with Family Search to allow registered Family-Search users to also use their sites free of charge often at some reduced access level.  The partner sites are listed in a column at the right side of every Person Page in Family Search, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10.  Menu of Partner Sites in Family Search.

We will look in a later lesson at how to register for free access to these sites, but for our research purposes now it is enough to know that by clicking on one of these links you will be transferred to that site and shown results of a search immediately made through that site’s database for the person whose Person Page in Family Search you are currently on. 

For example, if we click on the “Ancestry” link from the David Butcher Person Page, and after agreeing to leave the Family Search site, we immediately see the results of Ancestry’s search for David Butcher.  Figure 11 shows those results.

Figure 11.  Results of Ancestry search for David Butcher.

The first result is a new one that did not appear in the Family Search results.  It is a record existing on the “Find-A-Grave” web site, another partial partner to which we can go free-of-charge from Ancestry.  The cemetery information contained on the Find-A Grave site is all primary and direct evidence for the burial of the ancestor, but the additional family information that might be found has been supplied by users and is often inaccurate, incomplete, and given without sources.  But it does constitute useful clues for further research.

The next three results shown in Figure 11 are ones we have already seen in Family Search.  Scrolling further down the Figure 11 page reveals additional new Civil-War sources that we will want to copy back to David’s Person Page.  In lesson 12 we will look at how to move facts and sources between Ancestry and Family Search.

In this lesson we have seen several ways to conduct research from the Family Search site.  There are other productive ways to research names and places on other genealogical sites and also using the Google search engine.  Practice and experimentation will open many research doors to the committed searcher, it will just require time and patience to find them.

In our next lesson we will discuss submitting names for temple ordinances.