Thursday, October 1, 2015

FamilySearch Introduces Searching on Largest Genealogy Websites - Post 2: Searching on Ancestry.com

On the FamilySearch Blog recently, Matt Wright wrote New Feature: Search Genealogy Records on the World's Largest Sites. 

On each profile in the FamilySearch Family Tree there is a box with links to FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage and Findmypast:

I wanted to see how this feature works, so I am going to use one of my tree persons, Nicholas Brocke (1855-1938) (FSID L416-YCP) to see what records are found by each website.

I reviewed the search results on each site in:


*  FamilySearch Introduces Searching on Largest Genealogy Websites - Post 1: FamilySearch Matches (30 September 2015)

1)  Here are the John Nicholas Brocke search results on Ancestry.com (three screens shown):



For this search, Ancestry.com filled in these search fields for John Nicholas Brocke 

*  First and Middle Names:  John Nicholas (Broad search)
*  Last Name:  Brocke (Exact, Sounds Like, and Similar search)
*  Born:  1855 (Broad search)
*  Birthplace:  Michigan, USA (Broad search)
*  Death:  1938 (Broad search)
*  Death Place:  Lewiston, Nez Perce, Idaho, United States (Broad search)

2)  There were 118,710 matches for these search parameters in the Historical Records and Newspapers and Stories collection on Ancestry.com.  The ones that pertain to the subject John Nicholas Brocke (1855-1938) - in my judgment - are:

#1:  U.S. Find A Grave Index, 1600s-Current
#2:  1930 U.S. Federal Census
#3:  1900 U.S. Federal Census
#4:  1870 U.S. Federal Census
#5:  Idaho, Death Index, 1890-1964
#6:  Idaho, Death Index, 1890-1964 (second entry)
#8:  Web: Rootsweb Death Index, 1796-2010
#9:  Web: Rootsweb Death Index, 1796-2010 (second entry?)
#10:  1880 U.S. Federal Census
#11:  1920 U.S. Federal Census
#13:  1910 U.S. Federal Census

There were 11 records for John Nicholas Brocke on Ancestry, all in the top 13 matches when searched from FamilySearch Family Tree parameters.

Note that the search on Ancestry.com did not find a birth record, a baptism record, or a marriage record, but it did find a death record, a burial record, and an 1880 U.S. census record not found on FamilySearch.

When I searched with the Family Trees and Photos & Maps collections on Ancestry.com included, there were 119,320 matches, including the Ancestry Member Tree and two photos attached to one of the trees.

Obviously, any search depends on the information put into the search fields and the name variations used in the search algorithms.  There may be other records for this person on FamilySearch that have different name spellings, different birth information, etc.

3)  I will review the search results for MyHeritage in the next post in this series.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/10/familysearch-introduces-searching-on.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.



2 comments:

June said...

Randy, Don't forget to add the URL after your statement, under #3,The URL for this post is:

Nicely done, as always.

Enno Borgsteede said...

The sad thing is that Ancestry presents tree persons from a big local site as BMD records. That means that it is utterly useless here, and it makes me sad that FamilySearch allows this kind of crap from a partner site.

This is not to say that everything on that local site is bad, but in my mind, presenting trees as records is a kind of fraud, and something that FamilySearch should really stay away from.