The Main Challenges of FamilySearch Full-text Search, Part Two

 
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/full-text/

As I continue with this series of posts, I am going to focus on FamilySearch's implementation of full-text searching. FamilySearch is free, and all you need to start searching is to register with the program. The search fields are surprisingly sparse, but they turn out to be adequate for most searches. The first challenge is to understand what information you need to put in the different search fields. With blank search fields, the invitation seems to be to fill in the information you're looking for in each of the fields. But the rule here is less is more. 

In part one of this series, I gave an illustration of the variety of forms of the name John in English and other languages. You need to begin thinking about how the information you're seeking may have been recorded in a variety of different documents. If you enter a very common search term such as the name "John", you may get millions of responses. FamilySearch's full-text search fields are hierarchical. The key words can be just about anything, but experience indicates that key words need to be able to identify various types of documents that you're searching for. For example, you might enter the keyword "deed". This tells the full text search to look for documents in that category. As you add information to the other search fields, you always want to keep in mind how the entries might be represented in the documents you're searching. 

Here is an example of a basic search. 

The quotation marks tell the search to look for the entire name rather than individually searching for all the Henrys, all the M's, and all the Tanners. You also need to remember that you are searching only the documents that have been processed by FamilySearch and made available to the full-text search. Over time, of course, the number of documents processed is changing at many millions per day, and so full-text searches will become more and more valuable. In this case, the name "Henry M. Tanner" is not common, and therefore the number of responses turned out to be very small. 

Despite this forced focus, the responses do include people who are not my particular Henry M. Tanner. The next step you could add a physical location for the records by editing the search fields. You can edit the search directly from the responses. There is a very difficult-to-see link called "Edit Search". When you edit the search, you get a surprise. The searches you found previously may or may not be found in a subsequent search. By adding a place name, you have eliminated any documents with the original name of the person that do not have both the place name and the person's name. 

 Here are the results.

Even if you go back to the original search to try and use the list that showed up initially, you may be surprised to find that another search turns up a different set of documents. You should go through each set of documents that are produced, unless, of course, you get millions of documents. Make sure to save the documents that you intend to use. Click on the image for the documents that you want to preserve, and you will see the transcription of the document in the language of the document. If the document is in Spanish, the transcription will be in Spanish. You can then use the icon tools to attach the document to a person in the FamilySearch family tree, edit the document, or download the document. There are also some tools for adjusting the image. 

Bear in mind that unless you use the quotation marks, you will be looking for every one of the words in the name or other information you enter. Place names are standardized, and so you may have to make some alterations if the place you are looking for does not happen to be already standardized by FamilySearch. 

Because you happen to find some documents does not mean that the full-text search has found all the documents in all the collections on the FamilySearch website. For example, if I change the place name to use simply Arizona, then I get an entirely different set of documents. 

In another example, if I use the name Tanner rather than the full name of my great-grandfather, then I get a different set of documents.

In some cases, the number of variations you would need to try can be overwhelming. 

 Stay tuned. There's probably going to be a part three to this series.