Understanding the status all of the records on the FamilySearch website

 

There are multiple categories of records hosted on the FamilySearch.org website and you may be surprised to find out what you have been missing. As this post is being written there are over 8.7 billion records on the FamilySearch.org website (hereinafter "the website). There are about 4.51 billion digital images published. See Company Facts. 

Here is a list of the categories with a comment about their availability. 

1. The basic collection of searchable records on the website  are contained in the Historical Record Collections. 

This collection has digitized records that are cataloged and indexed. Not all the individual record collections are completely indexed. You can view a list of the published collections by clicking on the link under the "Find a Collection" section on this web page. Some of the collections are still marked as "Browse Images" which means that none of the records in the collection are yet indexed. Even collections that show a number of records are possibly not fully indexed. You need to look at the total number of records in the collection and compare total to the number listed on the last updated list. Here is a screenshot of the list sorted by last update. 

If you click on a particular image link, you will see the catalog entry for that collection. You can tell if all of the records have been indexed by comparing the number of records in the list with the total number of records listed in the catalog entry. 

2. I have already pointed out that some of the records in the Historical Record Collections are not indexed but the number of indexed records is only a small percentage of all the records on the website. It is also important to understand that the indexing process does not always include all of the information and names on the record. A large number of records on the website appear only in the Catalog. 

The catalog does not contained a link to all of the records on the website. Many of the records on the website that are digitized but not indexed are cataloged and listed in the catalog. These records may have their own index but otherwise are only searchable page-by-page. The records are primarily organized geographically and then by category. 

If you do a name search on the website, you are only searching the indexed records; a very small set of the entire collections of records. 

3. The website contains a huge collection of digitized books that are fully searchable. Currently, there are 509,768 digital books on the website. This number continues to increase as more books are digitized. The books are searchable from the Books section of the Search menu. 

4. A significant part of the digital records on the website are use restricted in some way. For example, some of the digitized books are subject to copyright or publication limitations and cannot be viewed online. Other records may only be viewed while using a computer in a Family History Center. Here is the link to the explanation of why some of the records are restricted. See "Why are there access restrictions on Historical Records?"

5. The effort made by FamilySearch to digitize records around the world is ongoing. However, the number of digital images being created is far outstripping the effort needed to catalog and index all the records. At the beginning of this post, there is a screenshot of the Images search page of the website. There are millions of digital images that have been collected in this section that are not indexed or cataloged. You can search for these images by country. Here is a screenshot of the list for Argentina for an example. 

These records are only searchable individually, page-by-page. As new images are digitized the collection of these records increases day by day and week by week. As the records are cataloged, they move into the catalog and are then available in that way. 

I might add here at the end that there are more records in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library in Provo, Utah that are not on the website at all. Persistent researchers may find a gold mine of unindexed records that are not in the catalog either.