Family Search ( or familysearch.org ) is a free service provided by the Church of Latter Day Saints. Although free it does require you to register. I have been on a long time, so I am not sure, but they may try to up sell some products.
I have used this site many many times, the last time I used it I found that while they have many records that you can view online at home, just as you can on the Antenati, they also have records that are NOT on the Antenati that you can view by going to one to the LDS research center. They have them all over the world and I’ll show the steps below on how to find people using family search and how to find a research center
Catch our podcast on the topic Familysearch.
Family Search Log In
When you first access the site you will see a screen similar to this one. I get logged in automatically so your screen may appear a little different. It only takes a minute to register and you will be on your way.
Family Search Records
Costanza Saluzzo is my paternal grandmother’s grandmother. I searched the Antenati for her and found some records, but not all her records show. So how did I figure that out? Here is my initial search on the Family Search site. The first screen is my search and the second screen is the results returned.
As you can see, there were 1065 records returned. That’s an awful lot to parse through, however, since I knew her husband was Luigi Caracciolo and that she was born in 1790 I refined the search. The refined search returned only 18 records.
Only one of these records, the very first one, did I find on the Antenati site. I would also point out that even if you want to look on the Antenati, Family search is a good first step. When you click on the record icon on the far right you get the results below. Which is helpful in and of itself, but can also help narrow down your Antenati search.
Clicking on the tree icon will open a pop up window that shows any information connected with the record. In this case you can see that there are 14 sources. You can view these sources and correct information on the record.
Family Research Centers are available globally. I suggest you call like I did before you go.
One final bit of information is that you can create your tree and it will populate ancestors automatically if it finds matches. We will get more into this in our next post.
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This is great information but please mention that there are thousands of un-indexed records that one can access through the Catalog. You can search by Province and “city” if you know from where your ancestors came.