My favorite thing in genealogy research, actually I have a very long list of favorite things,
but really my favorite thing in genealogy research is the ability to do so much from home.
Online genealogy research has totally transformed my ability to crack down brick
walls and start working on projects I never thought I'd work on before.
How do we do that? We do that through search
engines on these genealogy websites. How does one begin to compare the
best genealogy websites on the internet? Well, today I'm going to focus on one thing,
and that is the Search Engine of four genealogy websites.
Findmypast MyHeritage
Ancestry and FamilySearch
Now, there are plenty of other websites that have genealogical information, but these four are
global. They are also dedicated to genealogy research,
have a family tree-building capacity, and have genealogy record
collections for us to search. Howdy! I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family
History Fanatics, and I love helping people do genealogy. So, let's start with Ancestry.
If we click on this 'Search' at the top (or we can use the one here at the front).
I'm going to click on 'Search.' I'm going to go to 'All collections.'
One thing Ancestry does when it is on this profile search page is to look at your family tree.
Now, if you have multiple trees like I do, you need to switch to the correct tree.
So, in this case, the Lujan project tree. And it says, "Hey,
is this the person you want to look for?" I really like that, but for now, we're just
going to pretend that it doesn't have the quick suggestions so, we can compare everybody equally.
So we're going to go ahead and say where he might have lived.
Ancestry gives you some recommendations. Do you mean San Miguel, Donna Anna or do you
mean San Miguel County, New Mexico? That is a nice feature.
Then I do like that Ancestry asks for the birth year. A number of the sites, you're going to see
later, don't really start with a birth year that way. They ask for any year.
I do like that Ancestry asks you- birth year. And it also gives you a little calculator.
His age in years? That's really nice tool that I didn't
know before I started filming this video. So, good job, Ancestry making little
things for us that are useful and valuable. Another thing you can do is to filter your range.
I'm going to leave it off for now. So, with that information right there,
we can search, but notice it says the birth is 1889, and any event in San Miguel.
So, with those parameters, let's go ahead and take a search.
Again, Ancestry keeps saying, "Hey, do you want to look at this person in your family tree? We
can pull that information in there." Nice try, but I'm keeping it equal.
I do like that we can change the search parameters for the name, for the last name,
for the age range, for the location. This really comes in handy when you
do 'county and adjacent counties,' and 'state and adjacent states.'
And I don't know that I've seen any other genealogy website doing that.
Another thing I like that you can do on Ancestry is to filter by the country.
Let's say I only want records from the United States.
That's quite nice. You could do 'record location' down here, as well,
but, it's nice to be able to do it right up there. And click 'Apply.'
And so now, it takes it down from 19,000 records to just 12,000.
Over here, you can see some of the search results. Now, the search result layout is one of the
most familiar with because I have done a lot of research on Ancestry.
And just because it's familiar, doesn't mean it's the best.
I also like that it tells you, "Hey, guess what! You already looked at this five days ago."
Thanks. Thanks for reminding me.
We can see that there is a 'Record View' or this is a master index.
And so, it shows you there's a record, but there's no little picture icon next to view.
So, that tells you that one's an index, and then the other one is a record.
There are a lot of hints that really target this ancestor.
So, we have his draft record in San Miguel. We have the 1900 census in San Miguel, Sabinoso.
We've got the World War record- Sabinoso, as you can tell, is in San Miguel.
And then we have something that's nearby this Veterans Administration. That's not so bad.
We have land records. And if we hover over that,
we're gonna see it's in San Miguel. I like that it's really, really focused.
I'm starting to see some other records that I haven't explored yet.
we've got a World War I Service Record. It's in Sabinoso.
So, that's important- a number of those entries. And now, we're starting to get in to different
names, different locations, and things of that nature; because, not all records are
going to have everything you want. So, let's go ahead and go here
to this US World War I Draft Register. So, when you come into the profile card,
notice the suggested records that come up first. Where is this information coming from?
These suggested hints aren't necessarily algorithmic recommendations. They're
actually pulled from other member trees. And so, the more that these records
appear in someone else's family tree attached to somebody with the search
parameters you put in, that's when these show up. And so, you're leveraging the research of others
without having to access their family tree, which may or may not have accurate information in it.
Next up, we have FamilySearch. And they seem to have redesigned their
search page- their entry page in the beginning part of this year, and I made two videos about it.
The first is 'Search Historical Records, the next is to 'Find a Collection,' and
the third is to 'Search by Place.' And while those are handy, I'm going
to make sure that we're only comparing the same type of search portions of the page.
So, let's go ahead and look at this. So, we can do this very broad search field.
I will be honest, I'm not as much a fan of this as Ancestry; because Ancestry tells you,
"Give me a birth date." And when you put in a birth date, we're gonna look
for records around that birth date. Here it's the birth or death date,
and the results aren't always as wonderful. So, what you have to do instead is you
have to click on 'More Options.' And then, instead of having it in
the generic place, we move it over to birth. So, notice they have the name, and the record,
and the position on the chart- the principal person. You'll see wife, daughter, and other
relationship to the people on the record there. We have the event, name, a date, a location,
and then the birth date below it. Then we could see some relationship information.
Now, because FamilySearch, unlike the other three, is a global collaborative tree, what you're going
to see are these little links like this. And what that means is somebody has
already attached this record to a profile. So, we'll click on this one, and it takes us
to this Jose Ignacio Lujan page. And sure enough, this actually
is the Jose I'm talking about. That is different from the other
websites, simply because of the nature of the FamilySearch approach to doing genealogy research.
And so, when you see that, you see somebody else is attached us to the family tree.
You might as well check out the record. Then check out who it's connected to and see
if that decision has already been made for you. And then, you can scroll down and look at these
other records to see if they apply. Now, one thing that I'm already
seeing is that we're starting to get other people's names rapidly in these results.
We're not sticking with, "Hey, I want Jose. I want San Miguel. I want 1889. I
don't want you to vary the name just yet." But you're going to start seeing the name
variations going before we come down to, Jose I, Jose I and then other variations of that.
So now, you can change that by clicking on 'Match First Names Exactly.'
But then, that takes out the Jose Is, and invariably I get a note results round even though
you did see results for Jose Ignacio right there. There's other ways to filter.
You can filter by collection, coming up here. And all of the things that you saw on the side
for Ancestry, are across the top here. As you want to add other parameters,
you can change them up here. Now, one thing I just failed
to mention is that typically we don't have that box to 'Search Exact.'
In order to turn those on, you have to come down to the bottom of the right scroll screen.
Click on that toggle switch. And then, you're going to
start seeing these options right here. Now, there is one thing that is very interesting,
that I think few people are using on FamilySearch. And that is this 'Preference Options.'
So, you can have these search results look like this, or you can click on 'Preference' and
change the amount of information you're seeing. One thing you can change, as I switch to the datasheet,
notice that everything is in table form. So now, instead of having the name, the role on
the record, the collection, and everything kind of condensed.
Now, you have everything in its own collection table.
So, we're going across, and you can see we've got all the different dates,
all the different activities, all the different facts associated with a profile, and what the
information that might appear on the record. You can also customize your data sheet.
Perhaps you really don't want the children. You don't want the siblings
You don't want the other or their date. And you can truncate what's on your table.
So that's an option. The other thing is perhaps
this is too much information to look at once. You can actually export the table, and you can
export the results right there. That's kind of handy for those
who are interested in that. Let's go back up to fix table.
There's another option, perhaps you want a whole lot fewer your details in your entry, or maybe you
want all of the information and the entries. And, so now, you can see it here.
Okay, so census, birth, ethnicity, single, white. And you can see all of the information
that was extracted from that record and then put on FamilySearch in their index page.
So now, we're over on MyHeritage. We're going to go ahead and fill out their form.
Notice that as you type something into the field, you have the option to match
name exactly or not. So, we're going to do 'Match Exactly,' and see what happens.
Year of birth, I do like that it asks the year of birth.
But one thing I'm not a fan of, is when I type in this location,
the results don't always limit to the birth. This place can be any place on the record.
Now, I did catch my mistake before continuing. I want San Miguel, New Mexico,
not San Miguel, Mexico. Do you remember how on Ancestry,
it gave us a prompt? And I could have quickly said, "Oh no! Not Mexico. New Mexico."
So here, you don't have that place name prompt. So it can lead to some confusion.
Now, MyHeritage is set up like here- where everything is compacted into a little box.
You can tell if it is just an index or if it's an image- with index based on
whether there is a person icon or if there's a record here at the right.
That's kind of handy. The one thing that MyHeritage
does better than the other platforms, is it searches newspapers and periodicals and
have them show up much higher than you would expect in search results.
And I do like that. Unfortunately, though,
sometimes they don't always give you newspaper results that would be applicable, because notice
1889 is Jose's birth year, and this document 1883. It could apply to his father,
but it wouldn't apply to him, because it's published six years before he was born.
If it applied after his death, that makes sense. Because there's a lot of records that come out
after somebody's death, but not before. So I'm not really a fan of that.
But let's say, "All right. I want to filter my results to five years from this birth date."
I still think we're going to wind up with a number of results that we're not too fond of.
The other thing is, I changed that one thing, right? Five years- plus the minus five years.
I'm still in San Miguel, New Mexico, and I'm getting family trees and records from Argentina.
This is not hopeful information. Many of the search results,
I'm not particularly fond of. You can add more filters, add a life event,
and you can make the place go together here. I don't want to talk negatively too much of
people's websites, but I do have the most problems with the search results on MyHeritage.
The one thing they do have that I do like is the ability to change the results layout.
I think that's going to be a more standard option on many genealogy websites, so look for that
and the different services you provide. So right here, you can have this view,
or you can have more of a tabular view. You don't have as many choices,
but at least you can have things line up in a way that helps you compare things better.
Last, we have Findmypast. So you can search right from this page, or you
can go up to the search 'Search All Records' view. I'm going to go ahead and start right here.
Notice it says, "Add in the information." And it gives you the option this, I really
like this, it makes it so intuitive. Plus the website's so pretty. I really
like the graphic design of Findmypast. So whoever is responsible for it, way to go!
So born, or died, or other. We're going to stick with born 1889.
It already gives you a plus or minus two-year range, which makes a lot of sense, because
not all records get the birth year correct. Notice, now, it will say where? I like this!
I want to 'Limit Records to a Country.' Every change you make, there's going to be
a total results down here at the bottom. Watch what happens when I
changed it to 1889- 55 results. Now, I want to limit the results to United
States - still 55 results. Not too bad! That is really nifty.
I just like that. Let me know if you do as well.
So I'm going to click on the 'Review Result.' Now, there's 55 results. There's not a lot
to go through, but I really like that it's super focused.
If I want to 'Filter by Collection', I can do that over on this side.
I can change the radius of how close a record has to be to a location. That's kind of handy.
I really like that option you can go in and adjust any of the parameters here on the right.
And then it makes it easy to change the date range, as well.
It looks for name variations. If it doesn't include the name variations, then you only
have 45 results, so it's going to take out Joe and Joseph and other things like that.
So I'm going to put that back in there, hit 'Enter,' and it goes back up to 55.
Like Ancestry, Findmypast in these little icons over the right. If you see a little thing,
little check mark, you will know you've already looked at that before.
If you have already made a decision about that. The thing I absolutely love about Findmypast
that sets it apart from the others. (And yes, you're starting to figure
out which one's my favorite.) I like that, even though it
doesn't have as much information. It doesn't have the parent's name.
It doesn't have the children's name on this view. You can't customize it like the other websites.
The one thing you can do is, you can sort by name. You can sort by last name.
You can sort by year of birth. You can sort by year of death,
the record here, and the record set. One thing that would make this the
hands down best winner, is if you could also sort by location. So then,
you can see everything in San Miguel County, or you can see in Trinidad, Las Animas, Colorado,
you can see Texas, and so on and so forth. That would make this pretty dang slick.
So I'm going to sort by first name, and notice I'm going to get all the Joe Is,
and then I'm going to get all the Jose's. And then it will start going down to the
Jose Ignacio, the Jose Is, and that's a really neat filtering option.
If I have mentioned one of your favorite genealogy websites, go ahead and hit the like
button and then leave me a comment as to which one is your favorite genealogy search engine.
To be honest, all four of them have strengths and weaknesses,
but whenever I say, "which one is my favorite?" I have to say the ability to sort a table result
by name, by birth date, by record set, and so forth. That absolutely is my favorite!
If I have to pick my next favorite, I think it would be FamilySearch.
And it's only because of the linking to a common family tree, so you know other people
have decided this record belongs to this person. And that little reminder is a way to be able
to say, "Oh, okay! Yes, this. I've already found this. So let me focus on this record.
This isn't attached to anybody. Let's see if it's my Jose Ignacio."
But as far as beautiful websites, my favorite is Findmypast.
I really and truly want to know what do you like
about the different websites search engines and what do you dislike.
Let's have that conversation in the comment section.