Location, Location, Location

It isn't exactly news that FamilySearch.com has become one of the very best web sites for genealogical research nowadays, having much improved its offerings from the questionable member-submitted information and unconfirmed family trees of old to the free-to-download scans of actual vital records that can be found there today. Did you know, however, that there’s a way to search specific state records rather than slog through all of the results that a basic records search yields? It’s true, and it could save you a lot of research time.

Searching for family members by specific location is handy, particularly when you're looking for a family member with an exceedingly common surname. The problem with using the site’s basic search option is that although you may specify "New York" as the birthplace of your ancestor, the search will yield results that aren’t New York specific, requiring you to either filter results (which may work) or click through a bunch of pages that have no value to you at all. If you know where y our ancestor lived, searching by location yields far more relevant results.

Here's how one searches by location on Family Search:

1. Click on "Search" in FamilySearch web site's top bar.

2. Instead to filling out the resulting search fields, look to the lower right and click on the Browse All Published Collections link.

3. Select the Place, Date or Collections in the left sidebar on the resulting page. By doing so, you are narrowing down the scope of the search in a way that's far more likely to find your ancestor. (For the purpose of an example, I select "United States of America" and then "New Jersey," to look for a female relative that I know lived there.)

4. After selecting the state, a list of individual databases comes up. For my New Jersey search, the list is as follows:

New Jersey Deaths and Burials, 1720-1988	1,025,623	25 Feb 2013
New Jersey, Births and Christenings, 1660-1980	2,126,666	21 Mar 2012
New Jersey, Calvary United Methodist Church Records, 1821-2003	Browse Images	04 Dec 2012
New Jersey, County Marriages, 1682-1956	300,071	14 May 2014
New Jersey, County Naturalization Records, 1749-1986	Browse Images	18 Jun 2014
New Jersey, Marriages, 1678-1985	802,437	04 Mar 2012
New Jersey, Middlesex County Probate Records, 1830-1921	Browse Images	19 Dec 2011
New Jersey, Probate Records, 1678-1980	Browse Images	18 Jun 2014
New Jersey, State Census, 1885	1,294,279	13 Feb 2014
New Jersey, State Census, 1905	2,146,861	22 Jun 2012
New Jersey, State Census, 1915	2,785,409	08 Oct 2014

As you can see, some listings say "Browse Images" next to them. This means they have not yet been indexed and are not searchable, so one would need to go through the images one by one to look for information. You’d need to know approximately when your ancestor might have generated a record in order to possibly find it. The other databases with large numbers in the same column, however, hold records that are already indexed, so you can click into the database and plug in your ancestor's information. Those records, if any, should pop right up.

Hopefully, searching by location on Family Search will help you to find your hard-to-find ancestors more easily. If it does, I hope you’ll post about it in the comments section, letting me know.

"Coffee" image above courtesy of luigi diamanti/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net