Welcome to our session today, everybody. It's an honor to be here. And I hope that you walk away at the end of this next hour with a whole bunch of information that will be exciting to you and beneficial. My name is Robert Kehrer. I'm the senior product manager of search and hinting at FamilySearch. And we're going to dive into this session called Finding Elusive Records. Let me tell you who this session is for. This is meant for the researcher who's done searching. They understand that records are used to build conclusions. They've done some basic searching, but want to take their skills to the next level. They realize there's a lot of data out there that they need to find, and they haven't found it yet. And that's who we're going to deal with here. I hope you walk away feeling more capable of finding those. This presentation is broken into two main sections. The first section, we'll talk about finding records that are not indexed. And after that, we will talk about some of the tools in our search system. Some of the more advanced tools that will help you find the records that are difficult to identify. Why should you care about unindexed images? Well, it turns out that our capacity at FamilySearch to acquire and digitize images and records far surpasses our ability to index and make them searchable. Today, about half of the data on our website in the bottom half of that circle is our images that are unindexed. And you'll find them in various collections on our website. Another quarter of the data is images that have been digitized but have not been put into collections. They're only accessible from the FamilySearch catalog. What that means is about 77 percent, or 3/4 of the data on the FamilySearch website, is not available through the search system or hinting. If that's the only thing you've done, you're missing out on about 3/4 of your ancestor data. And we're going to help change that, I hope, today.

It turns out that in some of those images sets, the person who created the image set actually created a manual index. For instance, a good Catholic priest in a parish might start in January doing baptisms and marriages and death for their parishioners, and he's recording it in his book. And then at the end of the year, he'll allocate a little time and some pages in his book to go back and build an alphabetical index or something of all of the people he's done ordinances for. When we find that index in the book, we photograph that. And you'll find that in the image sets. Let me show you how that's used. Each one of my examples will be a research task. And my task now is to find the baptismal record of Carlo Russo. He was born early in the year of 1801 in the Sant'Idria Parish of Catania. My first stop is always going to be the person page in the family tree to familiarize myself with him, his family, and what's known about him. I notice that he has some parents. His father's Antonio and his mother's Sebastiana La Rocca. But I notice here that there's no hints. And I'm going to do those first, because that's the low-hanging fruit. But I don't have any. And I also see there's no sources attached. The next thing I would do is do some searching, because that's my next lowest-hanging fruit. But let's say I didn't find anything. So what am I going to do? Well, one of the things I could do is to go to the map. Up here on our website, this is a search page and it's accessible under this Search menu, is a map of the world. And as I mouse over the regions of the world, I can click on those, and it will pop up a list of countries. Catania is in Italy, so I'm going to scroll that list, and I'm going to click on Italy. When I click, it will take me to a page on our website that is dedicated to researching Italy. On that web page, we allow the user to search the indexed collections. We have a learning center link that will teach them about how to do research. And there's reading Italian records and stuff. That's great. Links to the catalog and the wiki. But down below the search form, we have a section for image-only records. These are all the collections that haven't been indexed. As I look through those, I notice this one. It says Italy, Catania, Archdiocese, de Catania Catholic church records. It covers the year 1801. It appears to me that's a really good place to start if I'm looking for a baptismal record in Catania. So I'm going to click that. Each one of these collections has a page dedicated to it. It gives a summary of the collection. It will give me search forms if it's searchable. In this case, it has Browse Images. I see a Learn More link there. You should always go to the Learn More link. Each one of our collections on the website, and there is over 2,000 of them, have a specific page. I'm going to click Learn More. It takes me to the FamilySearch wiki. In this page, I will learn all about this collection. How to search it, what data is present in there. When I scroll down, and there's a How Do I Search Collection. Sometimes there's very valuable data on these pages. And in this case, it tells me that some of the records in this collection, particularly birth records, may have an index at the end of each year. Just like I noted that Catholic priests may do that. Some of these manually created indices in the images will be indexed by the given name of the father rather than the name of the infant. Now that's valuable information to me. So again, when you start researching in a collection, go to the Learn More link. I'm going to go back to the collection details page, and I'm going to click Browse through the 1.7 million images. Now I did the math, and if I can do an image every couple, two or three seconds, I should be done in 10 years.

We actually made it easier for you. What we do is we take these images and we divide them into chunks. So when I click that, it takes me into what we call waypoints. We've broken the 1.7 million images into these chunks by--in this collection, it's called the [SPEAKING ITALIAN] or [SPEAKING ITALIAN]--forgive--forgive my Italian--which is a jurisdictional level in the Catholic church. One higher than a parish. It turns out the Sant'ldria parish is in Catania. And there it is. And when I click into the Sant'Idria parish, I notice that they have baptism records, which is exactly what I'm looking for--so I'm excited--that covers 1797 to 1888. That's a 91-year range. That's going to be an important number for me in a second because when I click on those baptism records, I land on a bunch of thumbnails. And I notice that there's 2,721 of those images covering that 90-year one range. If I do the math, and this is pretty simple math, that turns out to be about 30 images per year. Now if you'll remember, it starts in 1797, and it goes to 1888. I'm looking for 1801. So if I start at 1797, I need to go four years' worth of images into this set of images. Four times 30 is about 120. Is it going to be on image 120, where the year starts? Probably not. But it gets me in the right ballpark. And I can use these tools up at the top, then, to poke around. So I'm going to jump. I'll probably type in 120 right here and then click the button and jump out to image 120. And I didn't find what I was looking for. I actually found the index for 1801 begins on image 79. So I had to jump around a little, but that's OK. It got me into the right ballpark, and I was able to find what I was looking for. This is what an index looks for, looks like in the image. The Catholic priest recorded the baptisms and other ordinances, and then he built the index manually. Now, I'm going to scroll down. And I find in this index Antonius Russo. Well, that's the name of the father. Remember, it told me on the Learn More page. And I noticed there's these weird things at the end. It looks like an F with a little circle and the number nine and the number 38. Now if I knew Italian really well, I would have instantly recognized that the F stands for folio, or the word "page." So it's telling me that Antonio Russo, the record that he's involved in, is found on page 9. I didn't know what 38 meant either, right off. But I went back in there and I realized oh, these are the ordinance numbers. There's a number next to each one of the ordinances. So I'm looking for page 9 in the book, ordinance 38. I can use the tools up there at the top to jump back. And when I do that, I find on image 70 is where I find page 8 in the book and page 9 in the book. Remember, those are not image numbers. That's in the book. And we keep the images in the order of the book. So on page 9, I find ordinances 35, 36, 37. And if I scroll down a little, there's ordinance number 38. Let's zoom in on that. And there it is. The day of 10th of February. There's infant baptism, Sebastiana La Rocca, Antonio Russo, and Carlos Angelo Luigi Russo. And this is his baptismal record in the hand of the Catholic priest. What I did, again, I looked at the Learn More. It told me about the collection. I went and looked for the index in the images at the end of the year. I went through that index until I found the name of the father. Sometimes it will be the name of the primary person. In this case it wasn't. The wiki told me that. And then I found the ordinance. Now what do I want to do? Well, I want to attach this image to the people mentioned in the image. And that's up in the top corner. Up here there's a blue Attach to Family Tree button. You will see that on all unindexed images. If the image has been indexed, you won't see that because we want you to attach the people to the people, not the whole image to the people. So I'm going to click Attach to Family Tree, and it's going to slide in a panel. In this panel, it lets me create a source. I can give it a source title and some notes. So I'll do that. I just--baptism, Carlo Angelo Luigi Russo. I don't read Latin, and this is in Latin. So I did my best, and I put some notes in here. The core genealogical info. And then at the bottom it says next, select person. Well, I've given it a title and notes, but I haven't told it who to attach it to yet. Remember, it's unindexed. The system doesn't know who's in this. And so in the next pane, I have a person selector. This is your history list. Just like in the family tree, it's going to be the last 50 people you've visited. And when I click on it--remember we were on Carlo's page in the family tree. So there he is. And I select him. Now what happens, when I select him, the system goes and looks in the family tree. And it says, does Carlo have any other people around him? Parents, spouse, children? And indeed, he does. He's got a mother and father. So it comes back and says, do you want to attach--you know, here's some other people. Do you want to attach it to them? And I do. So I just click on them. Now I've got green check marks. I'm going attach this image to all three. Even though this is a baptismal record for Carlo, I should attach this to the people mentioned in it. That's good genealogy, because this record provides evidence for their relationship. It provides evidence for these people's existence and where they lived. And sometimes that secondary evidence is useful. So I do that. Then at the bottom, I click the Next button. And it gives me an opportunity to describe why I'm attaching this. And it might be just as simple as the names, dates, places, and relationships match what's known about this family. What you really should type in here, though, is all of the logic that you went through to determine that these people in the record really are these people in the family tree. Then I click Attach. And I'm going to go over to his page again in the family tree, just because I like to make sure that what I did actually happened. And when I scroll down to the sources section, there's the baptism record with my notes and everything there, just like I left it. It has a link to the original document, image, and everything, for anyone who comes after me. What should I do next? Am I done? No. Because this is an unindexed image, I haven't taken the information from the image and put it into the tree. I should come up here and move that data from the image into his profile in the family tree. I'm going to click the birth and christening events. I'll open those up. And I'm going to look at the image and type in what was there. And then save that so that he has that data on him. Make sure, even if it's an indexed image or an index record, you should always look at the image and extract any additional meaning and information in that. That's how you deal with an image set where there's an index present in the image set.

Sometimes when we go into an archive and look at the shelves, they'll be a set of books here with a bunch of records in them. And we will notice that after the fact, it might be many years after the fact, somebody went through those books and created another book which is an index of it. It's not part of the book, but it's a secondary book. And when we find that, we photograph those too and put them together. Let me show you how that is done. My task is to find the marriage record for Thomas Dutton and Mary Cobb. They were married in Woodstock, Vermont. Now again, I'm going to go to her page first, not only to familiarize myself with her and her life and her relationships, but I also want to do my low-hanging fruit first. I want to check Record Hints and then search. And indeed, this case I get really excited. I'm on her page and I see Vermont vital records. Well, that could be marriage, birth, and death records. And so I need to click on it and see. Remember, I'm looking for a marriage record. When I click on it, indeed the event type is marriage. Done. Awesome. I found the record in a hint. But I know that I should always look at the image. So I do that. There's a View Image link at the bottom of these. And when I open that up, there it is. February 22nd 1824. Woodstock. But after looking at it a few seconds, something smells a little fishy to me. This is 1824, and I don't think they used Rolodex back then.

So I am going to make a guess that this is not the original marriage record. This is part of something created after the fact. A derivative from the original marriage record. And knowing genealogy, I know that things created years after the fact aren't as authoritative or as accurate as finding an actual record created at the time of the event. So I'm going to go dig deeper. I'll probably attach that, but that's not the one I'm really looking for. Last time we went to the map. This time I'm going to go to this Find a Collection. I'm looking for something in Vermont. So I just type Vermont into that field, and it gives me a list. One of the collections catches my eye. It's called Vermont town clerk vital and town records. It covers the 1824 year range. Seems like a good place to start, so I'm going to click that. It takes me into the collection details page. In this case, it's partly indexed so it has a search form. I do my searching. Don't find anything. But I do notice that down below there's a Browse through 1.3 million images. Now at this point, I'm not scared of that because I know all about waypoints. And when I click, it gives me the counties in Vermont. I'm looking for the city of Woodstock. I don't know what county Woodstock is in. But fortunately, I do know about this cool little tool on the internet called Google. Put in Woodstock, Vermont, and you can find what county it is. It turns out it's in Windsor County. So I click on Windsor, then I come here. I click on the town of Woodstock, and I want to see what cool stuff they got. And I'm flummoxed. At this point, I've got a couple different things that have marriages. There's birth marriages that covers 1824. Over here I've got another one, volume 1 marriages that covers 1824. Now I could do brute force. I could go into each of these and start looking for their marriage record and see if it's there. And it might take me a while. But I notice something interesting. There's these indices on the right-hand side. And one of those covers the years of 1824. So I look at that and say, wow, maybe this is a shortcut. When I click on it, it takes me to a whole bunch of these thumbnails again. You'll notice that at the beginning there's always these bookkeeping images keeping us honest, telling you what it is, everything else. The first thing you need to know when you encounter an index is to ask the question, how was it indexed? Is it indexed by the given name of the father? Is it in an index chronologically? So I'm going to grab one of these first images here, then see. Take a quick peek and see how is it indexed. It looks to me like I have groom names. They're all Ds. The brides' names are fairly chaotic and random. These aren't really alphabetical, but I got all the Ds here, and I'm looking for Thomas Dutton. So that's good. When I scroll down a little bit, and yours won't be this easy because you don't get to do the slide decks, there's Thomas Dutton and Mary Cobb in the index. You might need to poke around on a couple of different images. The thing I really came here for is on the side, though. I'm delighted that their marriage record is in the index. That confirms that I'm going to find something. And it tells me I need to go to volume 1, page 16. Armed with that, I can go back to this page. And now I know that I'm looking for volume 1, not volume b. I'm going to click in on this. And I also know I need to get to page 16. This is a really cool tool on the side, here, that lets me jump to the thumbnails. If I'm ever on an image, I can jump to the thumbnails. Do I need to just go click on image 16? No, because the image number, again, is not the same as the page number in the book. I'm looking for page 16 in the book. And I've got housekeeping images and who knows what else up here at the beginning. As I use these tools up here at the top to poke around, I find that page 16 is actually on image number 33. But I found page 16. And looking down through whatever is on that page, I find there is the record I'm looking for. Thomas Dutton, Mary Cobb. I can even read this because, hey, it's not in Latin. It's in English. What's my next step? I found the original marriage record, not the Rolodex version that was created after the fact. I want to attach it to them. So I'm going to click the big blue button in the top. It slides in the panel again. I can add a source title and notes just like before. But this is even cooler, because I can read this. Eli Dunham, town clerk. Be it remembered that at Woodstock in said county on the 22nd--I can type in the whole thing. And so I do that. Then I click the next person. I get my person selector. I choose Thomas Dutton. If Mary was there, I could have chose her too. It doesn't matter. Because I know that after I choose Thomas, the system is going to go look in the tree, and it's going to bring in the other people. Now Mary--it's a marriage record, so she's mentioned in here, but obviously her sons aren't. So I'm just going to click her, because this is about her too. And then I click Next Person. I add in my reason statement. I'm judging that this record really is those people because of-- and I put that in. And then I click Attach. Now again, I'm going to go to her page. I'm going to scroll down. And there it is, what I typed in. I should go and extract the data from this. Put it in the tray. I won't do that now, but always look at the image. Read there. Put the data into their profiles.

Now what a lot of people don't realize is, and I mentioned this at the beginning, is that a lot of images on FamilySearch are not viewable in collections. You can't get them from the map. You can't get them from the collection list. The only place these images are accessible from, and it's about 25 percent of all of our data, is through the FamilySearch catalog. So we're going to dig deeper.

I got ahead of myself. They're in the catalog. My task. There's a man named John S. Powell. He died in Berrien County, Michigan, in 1893. And I want his probate record because probates are awesome. They're full of great information about their life, their relations, what they owned, what they did. So I want to go find John Powell's probate record in Berrien County, Michigan. I'm going to go to his page. I'm going to check for hints. I don't see any. I'm going to do some searching, maybe on the FamilySearch website, maybe on other web sites. I come up empty-handed. What am I going to do next? Well, I'm going to go look in the collections, just like we did before, and see, are there collections that are from that area that might be useful? No good. What do I do next? Well, I'm going to click on Search there at the top, and I'm going to choose Catalog from the dropdown. In the FamilySearch catalog, you will find an entry for everything in the FamilySearch holdings. All of our books on the shelves in the libraries. All of the microfilm. All of the indexed collections. All of the unindexed collections. And even the images that aren't even in collections. When I click on the catalog, I come to a search page. And just like any library, I can search their holdings by author, or place, titles, whatever. I'm going to just search for Berrien County. It's going to give me all the Berrien Counties in the catalog, or Berriens. There's Berrien Center, Berrien Springs Township. I just want the top one, United States, Michigan, Berrien. And then it goes and does a search and brings back all of the titles in our holdings that pertain to Berrien County. It tells me how many titles are under each of these categories. It tells me I've got cemeteries and church records and histories and maps and newspapers. But the thing that I really am looking for is probate records. And when I expand that, this one catches my eye because it covers 1893. It looks like a great place to start. When I click on that, just like, again, any library catalog, it gives me a page that defines that title. Where it is, who wrote it, or whatever. In this case, as I scroll down, I see that this title is really a compilation of a bunch of films. And each film, you can see there's images associated. Each film is a set of estate files. But I've got a problem, is I don't know what a state file might be for John S. Powell. Fortunately there's an index here. You'll often find that. And clicking that camera icon takes me, again, to a set of thumbnails. What's the question I need to ask? How is it indexed? So I'm going to go past the bookkeeping ones. I'm going to click on one of the first images. And I look and see that it's indexed alphabetically by surname. These are all the As, and they're alphabetical. And that this column is a file number, and that's what I'm really looking for. Now I need to use the tool and jump forward because if this is As, I'm looking for Powell, P-O-W. And so I'm going to use this tool up here to jump forward into the image set. And I noticed that on image 296--I might have to poke a little bit--but on image 296 is where I get to the P-O--and W is John S. Now what I really came here for into the set of index images was this number right here, 1,302. That's my gold. Armed with that number, I can then backtrack. I can go back to this page, and I can scroll through all of those films there and find the one that contains a state file 1,302. I also notice it's going to be late. It goes to 1308. So it will be far into the image set. And I click the camera icon. I come to the thumbnails. I got a lot of them, 3,256. I expect file 1,302 is going to be in there, and that's a lot of images to look through. You can't see the data on these thumbnails, but we gave you the thumbnails for a reason. It is very common in sets of thumbnails that you can see the divisions in the thumbnails visually. I look at these and I notice that every once in a while I see two blank images. And when I click on those, there's a name on the first one and a file number on the second. So what I'm going to do is come back, and I'm going to start scrolling up through these sets of thumbnails. And whenever I see one of these blank sets of images, I'm going to pop the second one open and see if I'm getting close to file number of 1,302. I find that on image 2,486 is John S. Powell, file number 1,302. Now it turns out, this is his probate. The third image says, I, John S. Powell, in the city of Hoopeston, in the county of Vermilion, in the state of Illinois. And it goes on. In fact, the next 78 images are all this probate. Do I need to attach all 78? I've clicked Attach up there, so I have my side panel. Do I need to attach all 78 images to John in the tree? I really don't. Because if I can attach the first image, anybody after me can click the link on the source and come right here to the first image and go through and read the probate. I'm going to add a name, or a title and a notes. Probate, there's 78 images here. Then I'm going to click Next. And I'm going to choose John S. Powell from my history list. If John wasn't in my history list, I could go to the family tree, copy his person ID from the family tree and paste it into this box and click the arrow and force anybody to load into that position. So I can attach this to anybody, even if they're not in my history list. I click on John. It looks in the tree. It says, hey, John has some extra people. In this case, two children. And I've read the probate, so I know that Drayton and Robert are mentioned in this probate. So I'm going to go and attach it to both of them, because they're mentioned here. And even though this is John's probate, this tells me information about Drayton and Robert. Who they were sent to live with, for instance, after John dies. I'm going to click Next Image. I can put in a reason statement. And then I go back to his page. I'm going to check and see. Scroll down, and there it is. I'm good to go. You can do this too by going to the catalog, searching for places. Find the record sets in there that look promising. If there's a camera icon, click that. It'll take you to the images. And don't forget that sometimes there's indices associated with those images that will make your job easy.

When we go into the search system, there's a number of tools in the search system that will give you a lot of power to find records that are difficult to locate. One of these is filtering results by collection. We have observed that expert researchers don't go into a search form knowing that a search is different than a hinting system. And the more stuff you put into search, the fewer things you get back. With a hinting system, the more data you have, the more accuracy in the records you get back. When I use a search system, I don't put in everything I know. A good researcher tends to put in just a little bit of information, cast a broad net. Bring back some stuff. If they get too much, they can add a few more parameters and iterate on that search. We've given you a tool that lets you cast a broad net. Bring in a whole bunch of records, and then analyze that set of records in pieces. Let me show you how this is done. I'm going to do a very broad search. My great-great-grandfather is Isadore. Isadore Allor. I'm going into six billion records and saying, show me all the records that have Isadore Allor, or variants of that name. And when I do that search, I get back 2,181 records. Now, I could look through them if I wanted to. It'd be painful. I could even show 75 per page. It would take me a while, but I could do it. But I don't really want to. And I don't need to, because we have this other tool up here at the top. I was looking at the records right now. These are individual records, but there's a Collections tab. And if I click it, it takes my 2,181 results and groups them by collection. Turns out my great-great-grandfather Isadore didn't live in California. Wasn't born there, so these collections are superfluous to me. England and Wales. He never went there. He lived in Michigan his whole life. On this page, I can see how many results are in each collection. Those are a bunch of results I don't need to deal with. I see that in the birth, marriage, and death section up here, they're just showing the top five. But there's 114 collections. I can click it and expand, just like I did for censuses. I'm showing all 23, not the top five. I also notice I can multi-select the collections I want to deal with right now. In this case, I'm looking for censuses. And then, when I've chosen the piece of that set of results that I want to deal with, I click Filter These Results, and it gets rid of all the ones that aren't part of those collections that I selected. Now I'm looking just at the censuses. And when I'm done, if I find them in the 1900 census, like this one right here, that's him. And I attach it, which I did. That's why the tree icon is there. I can close this by clicking the X. It will get rid of all of the 1,900 results and let me focus on just the ones where I'm still looking. When I'm done looking at this set of filtered results, I can click the Collections tab again. Unselect the censuses. Go after some birth records. But I wouldn't do California, I'd do Michigan. So I can cast a broad net. Filter down just to the collections and records that I'm interested in, saving me a ton of time.

We've built a feature that, when you find a record, lets you look at the image and jump around to other people on the image. Why would you want to use that? Well, it turns out it's not uncommon, if you find your ancestor in an image, other family members might be living up and down that street. They might be in the house next door. When you look at an image, we have a data grid down below. And that data grid gives you a tremendous amount of power to jump around to different families in the record. Let me show you how that's done. I've searched for Isadore Allor again, my great-great-grandfather. And I found a record in the 1860 census. Awesome. I notice it's already attached to the tree. It says Review Attachments, but I always like to go and look to make sure everybody is attached properly. So I click on Review Attachments at the top. Oh, here's his household. Isn't that cool? It's Isadore. He's four years old, living with his father, James, and his mother, Mary. That's my great-great-great-grandmother and father. So I'm going to click on the Review Attachments up at the top. It takes me into the source linker, and I can see that everybody is attached nicely. James is attached to James, Mary to Mary. But there's an image up here. And I like to look at the image too. So when I click it, it opens up the image right over the top of the source linker for me. I'm left in context. And there's James and Mary and Isadore. And I can see them in the record. There's Isadore, there's James. But notice up above, there's another Allor. Joseph is James's older brother. By golly, I want to attach them too. Well, you used to have to go back into the search form and search for Joseph and try and find his family in that collection. You don't have to do that anymore. Watch the data grid down at the bottom. If I scroll the data grid, these names are usually in the order of the image. And there is Joseph. If I click on him, his whole family selects. And notice, when I mouse over him, there's a little icon next to his name. If I click that icon, it takes me to his page in the census, with his family, Joseph and Esther and all their kids, just like I saw in the image. And then I can attach them to the family tree. So I can use that data grid to jump to anybody who's on that image and save myself a lot of time and hook up more and more family. When I do the attach, I look and I can get everyone attached properly. I notice something, that Joseph is here with Esther. There's some kids listed here, which are Esther's children, but there's other people listed. There's a tool right here. It turns out Esther is his second wife. His first wife was Emily. And if I click that little tool right there, it will pop open and let me choose other wives. If you haven't noticed that tool, it's a pretty powerful one. And if I was to choose Emily, then her children would move up. She would be shown here. And you can juggle people around that way.

Now as you're searching, sometimes it's beneficial--you know what you're looking for, and you want to get rid of everything that isn't exactly what you're looking for. You need a tool to clear out the clutter and return just what you're wanting to see. That tool is the exact search tool, and it looks like a little box at the end of a search field. If I mouse over it, it says match first names exactly. It reduces the variability. It hides records that aren't exactly what I typed. I'm going to get fewer things back. We can match data that you type in in a couple of different ways. We can match it exactly. If I type in Frank into a field and we find a record that has data on it that's exactly Frank, that's an exact match. Frank equals Frank. And that field will contribute the most to the overall score for that record. But it is possible, our system knows about name variants. It knows about translations from other languages. It knows about errors in transcription. And we have a database of all of the name variants. And so if I type in Frank, it's entirely possible that I might find a record that says Frankie or Franklin. See, my great-grandfather was born in the civil records as Franklin Bernard. But in the Catholic records, he was born as Francis Bernard. But he never used either of those names in his life. As a child he was Frankie, and that's why he shows up in 1900 as Frankie. And in the rest of his life he went by Frank. We all use multiple names. Our system is smart enough to do that. And this is called a close match. It contributes to the overall score, but it doesn't contribute quite as much as an exact match. Now, we also match data that's missing. That's a really strange concept. But play along with me for a second. If I type in Frank into the field, say I'm looking for Frank Allor, born in St. Clair, Michigan, in the year, I don't know, 1880. And the system finds a record that says we have a Frank Allor born in St. Clair, Michigan, but there's no birth date in the field. The field's empty. Do you want that record back? Yeah, you do. It's probably him. St. Cla--it's not a big town. So we will bring the record back. Even though you typed in a birth date, and this record has no birth date on it, we will bring the record back. We're just going to score it a little lower, and we're going to actually decrease the score. And it will be ranked lower. It will be lower on the page, or it might be on the next page. That's called matching on missing, or bringing something back that's missing. Let me tell you what "exact" means, by the way. Because it doesn't mean exactly what you typed in. We will bring back what you typed in with four deviations, four exceptions. We're going to ignore diacritics. If you type in Pena we'll bring back Pena. We're going to ignore spaces. If you type in delavega altogether, we're going to bring back a record where it's typed in by the indexers de space la space vega. We're going to ignore capitals. You type in Macdonald with a lowercase D, we'll bring back a MacDonald that has an upper case. And we're going to ignore punctuation. That apostrophe in O'Brien. As far as the system are concerned, everything on both sides of that equal is exactly the same. And we do that for a reason. Because we know how these records were curated. A lot of the systems that they went through didn't allow people to enter, or didn't capture, some of these things. We know you're going to have a better success rate if we ignore those four things. Let's do a quick search just to prove the concept. I have come into the main search form. I put in--I said, show me all the Isadore Allors. Show me all of them that were born in Michigan between these years. I also put in any event. Give me any event in that range. That's a powerful tool too, if you just want any life event. We let you do birth, marriage, residence, death. But if you want a military one or something, you can use those fields. I also said restrict it. I only want records from the United States and Michigan. Turns out putting birth up here doesn't tell the system to just give me birth records, because there's lots of types of records that have birth info on them. If I only want records of a specific type or location, I can use these tools down here. And then when I do that search, notice that I did not select the exact box. So I'm going to use all the name variants of Isadore. And when I do that search, I get back a lot of them. There is a record with Esadore, Isador without an e, Isadore. Isidore with an i. There is even an Idadore in there. Because we know about all those variants. Let's go back and do the exact same search. I haven't changed anything except clicking that box. When I do that search, everything I get back is Isadore. All of the records are spelled exactly the same way that I typed it in. Now, that's a powerful tool if you're really trying to drill in and get to just what you want. But that comes with that warning again. It will reduce the variability in your search results. It will hide records that aren't just what you typed in. You're going to get fewer things back. And it turns out that all those other records that I showed you, the Esador, and Isidore with an I and E. Those are my great-great-grandfather. So you'll miss things. Make sure you use that carefully so you're just drilling in to get just the stuff you know is there and you want right now. There is an opposite to searching with exact, and that's called searching with wildcards. Sometimes I want to increase the variability. I want more stuff. I want to cast a broader net. And our system lets you use wildcard characters right here in the search field. And it will help you bring back records that might be badly indexed or otherwise difficult to find. I'm going to take a simple task, here. There's a gentleman named Timothy Sullen Speaks, and I want to find him in the 1900 census. Well, the first thing I'm going to do is go familiarize myself--first thing I'm going to do is familiarize myself with him and his family. I can see when he was born, where they were married. His wife is Orleana Virginia. He has some children. So always become familiar when you start working with an ancestor. I come in to do the search. Show me all the Timothy Sullens Speaks born between 1845 and 49. I've added a couple years because census records, often the year on that's not exact. I said I only want records from the United States. I click this Location Tool and said United States. And I only want records of type census. So it's only going to give me back records where the primary event was typed census. When I do that search, I'm delighted. I've got a lot of records. There's the 1850, 60, 70, 80. I got the 1910, the 1920 censuses. This as a powerful search tool that can do that and pop just the records I want to the top. But the 1900 isn't there. Notice here, there's 90 of these. I didn't just get back these. I cut it off. There's 90 results. And I could look through all 90 of those results. It's not that many. But I know about a really cool tool that will save me some time. And that's the collection filter. So I'm just going to click on that. I see that there is three results in the 1900 census. So I'm on my way. I'm going to jump right in and find his record. I filter. I see the records, and I'm disappointed. None of those are Timothy in the 1900 census. What am I going to do? Well, I'm going to dig deeper. I'm going to use the new tool that I know about called wildcards. There's two kinds of wildcards. The first is the star character. I can't say the word asterisks very well. Neither can you. The star, if you put it into the search field, will replace zero to an infinite number of characters. If I go into the given name field and I put S-T-A-N star, it might bring back records that have Stan as the given name. Where it matched--the system replaced the star with zero characters. Or it might bring back Stanislaw, where the system replaced the star with five ambiguous characters. That's what the wildcard will do, is increase the amount of stuff brought back. I can even put multiple in there. I can put a star L-U-S star K. I have a colleague whose family name is Czelusniak. And you can imagine there's lots of name variants. It gets mangled. But he found that if he puts in star L-U-S star K into the search field, that pattern brings back most of the name variants of Czelusniak. It's a powerful way of bringing back just the records, a greater variability of records. The second kind of wild card is the question mark. If you put the question mark into your search text, it will be replaced by one and only one ambiguous character. Not zero, not an infinite. It might bring back Elizabeth with an S and a Z at that place. Remember, it doesn't match zero. So if you put it on the end, you're not going to get truncation. It won't replace the question mark with nothing. It's going to require something there, or you won't get the record back. Let's go back in and do that search for Timothy Sullen Speaks. Notice that in the last name field, I, as the researcher, made an assumption that there's probably a indexing error or something going on here. And so I'm going to dig deeper. I'm going to use my expert tools, and I'm going to replace some of the characters in his surname with some wildcards. The question might be asked, tell me, Robert, where do I put the wildcards? And I can't answer that. You have to think this through. In your family name, which characters are most likely to get mangled and misindexed? Well, I know that vowels are often messed up. They run together. Sometimes they don't look right. I put a couple of wildcards in there to try things out. I may have to iterate on it. I might have to change the first name, the surname. Try different wildcards, different characters. When I do the search with that surname, it brings back some records. And this one catches my eye. Why? Well, Sipalak is nothing like Speak. Most people would look at it and say, that can't be him. But look over here. Orleana V. It turns out I was helped a little bit because his wife has a very unusual name. Not very many people--Orleanas married Timothys. And it's in the right places and stuff. So I'm going to click on that. I notice there's a camera icon. I want to see, is it possible that this surname was misindexed? And indeed it is. Very possible. And when I look at this, it looks like there's a little bleed-through. I can see the S. I look at this, it looks like an F and an O. But then when I look up and see how the census taker wrote his Ps, look at this step-son up here. It's a detached circle on the P. So I can tell, well that probably a P. I can see the E, but it's got some junk above it. And I can see the A, which looks weird because it bleeds into Orleana's name, and a K. S-P-E-K. I can see Speak in that. The indexer saw Sipalak, and I don't fault him at all. It's a messed up name. But that's them. That's my family that I was looking for. So I can go back to the record. I can click Attach and attach that to everybody in the record. Use the wildcards.

Using a batch number. FamilySearch, when we went into archives and acquired images, our people who went into those archives, used some internal codes. Batches. They assigned numbers to help them keep their work organized. We exposed that to people, and it didn't take long for users to realize that those batch numbers actually mean something useful. The batch number tells me things about the sets of images. Like what parish it was from. What kind of images they are. What year range. And they started building lists of these so that they could dive in and find the records. We can use those too. If you have family that lived in one spot for many generations, and this is very common in Europe. In certain places the family would live in that parish for many generations. If you have someone who's born and their family lived in a spot of ground, one parish for many generations, you can use the batch number to do something pretty magnificent. Let me show you how that's done. I want to find Mary Leah. My goal is, I want to build her family. I want to reconstruct her, her grandfather, her father, her whole family, using the batch number. Because I believe they lived in the Shropshire parish for many generations. I'm going to go do a search. I typed in Mary Leah, [INAUDIBLE] Shropshire. I put a couple of years around her birth range just to make sure I got it. And then I said I only want type birth. So I'm going into this parish, or this place. Give me all the birth people in that range. I only want records where the primary event is birth or birth-like. When I do that, I get back a record that I instantly recognize. Well, that's her. I like that. That's Mary. Her christening date. And I learned some things. When I click on it, it expands right there in place. And I can see the other info on the record. Some of it's there. But I see that her father's name was Thomas and her mother's name was Jane. That's awesome. I also notice there's this batch number at the side over here, P01607-1. And that's what I can use to reconstruct the family. 1607-1 is a key number for me. Now, it turns out that those numbers, like I said, had meaning. And people would build the lists of them. If you go to the FamilySearch wiki--I just jumped from the record to the FamilySearch wiki, and I did a search for batch numbers. And this page is one that came up. In the FamilySearch wiki, this page tells me what those numbers mean. The letters at the beginning. And I learn on this page that P is christening records, M stands for marriages. And that number, batch number, pertains to [INAUDIBLE] parish. So I can come back and start building out her tree knowing that 1607-1 are christening records, M1607-1 will bring forward all of the marriage records from the parish. And I can start putting the data in. Thomas Leah and Jane. I got her christening date. And I might want to ask the question now, what was her maiden name? When were they married? I can come back to this form. And this is exactly where we left it. This is Mary's record, but I can change the data on this side. I can modify it. I can put Thomas's name in now. I can expand the spouse and put Jane's name in. I can take the P1607-1, swap out the P for an M. That tells me, bring back all the marriage records from this parish, and update my search. And I get Thomas Leah, married to Jane [Yestrope, and a marriage date. I just found the information that I wanted. Who was she, and when were they married? I can go back and add that. I can keep asking this question over and over again. If Thomas was born in this parish, then I can ask that question that I asked about Mary. I can come back and say, show me all the Thomas Leahs, notice I closed out Jane because she wouldn't be on his birth record. Whoops. Back up. And put in the P1607-1. Bring back all the christening records that have a Thomas Leah from this parish. I find one. And there it is. It tells me his father was Richard, his mother was Elizabeth. I can add that to my tree. I'm reconstructing the family by going back and forth between christening records and marriage records and working the generations. I can even turn this thing around. Well, I could ask that question. Same thing I asked about Jane. What's her maiden name? When were they married? Or I could turn it around and say, did Thomas and Jane have anybody else? Any other kids in this parish? I would do that by coming into the search form, not putting anything in the first fields. I want all of the people born 1790 to 1820. Why? Because I know when they were married. Let's give them a little time to start having kids. And they should probably have kids for about 30 years at the most. Show me all the births in this section to a Thomas Leah and a Jane. And there they are. And I've got Thomas's and Anna's and Sarah's and Mary's. Some of them are duplicates, but I've got all the kids from this marriage. Using the batch number is a very powerful tool. If your family lived in one spot of ground, you can reconstruct the family very easily using that. Last thing, searching from the family tree. When you're on the person page in Family Tree, there's a logo on the right hand side that looks like FamilySearch. The tree will take some of the person data and send it. You'll leave the Family Tree and you'll go to the search system. And the tree tells the search system, here's what I want you to search on. It only uses a limited amount of data. There's Joseph again. We met him earlier. And down here on his page, there's the FamilySearch logo. When I click it, the family tree sends you along with some data over to the search system. It sends you with the name, the birth information, the marriage information, and the death information. That's what's used. Now on this page, I can see which ones were attached with the little tree logo. And it makes it real easy, because we give you a banner at the top that you can compare. Make sure you check those trees though, because sometimes they're not attached to the right people. In this case, someone told the system that Joseph was the same real historical person as Lydia, and they're the same real historical person as Charles. I'm going to want to go detach those and attach it up properly. The data that's used, again, is the given names, and the birth, marriage, and death. We don't use--we add two years on each side of the place. And we truncate the location just to the country and subcountry. The reason we do that is because we did a bunch of testing and found that that's the best combination of parameters to get someone started. The key thing, though, is, use your wits and go iterate. You can change this data. Use the data we gave you up at the top from the family tree and change it. You should be iterating on these searches because the--you're going to use that data at the top. The search system gives you all the bells, whistles, and tools you need to iterate. Add, delete things. Change things. Try name variants. Use wildcards. Use exact searching and everything else. It's like putting you in the cockpit of the 747. The hinting system is more like sitting in that luxury first-class seat. And they come along and say, your records, ma'am.

But there's a warning. Remember, hints aren't always 100 percent accurate. We're pretty close. We're like, 99 percent, in general. But you should still analyze your hints rigorously.

Lastly, if you need help, we have some user forms. Product managers like myself come to get satisfaction. We answer questions. We take things back into our teams if there's bugs. There's a help center. And you can go to a local family history center. These are brick-and-mortar places where living people can help you. And you can also have an email here, the FamilySearch.org ask help. Thanks for coming. I hope that you can go dig in. And this gives you more power to find those records that are difficult to locate. Thanks for coming. [APPLAUSE]