They’ve done it again. FamilySearch stealthily added records to the experimental search using handwriting recognition and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to convert an image of text into a machine-readable text format.
I searched for Smith and got 12,579,267 hits. Here’s the breakdown by place.
Asia & Middle East (2)
Australia & New Zealand (389,197)
Canada (1,080,751)
Continental Europe (56)
Mexico (91)
Other (822)
Pacific Islands (7)
South America (2)
United Kingdom and Ireland (316,133)
United States of America (10,787,306)
I don’t recall there being UK and Ireland hits previously. Subdividing those Smith hits:
England (271,646)
Scotland (36,316)
United Kingdom (3,690)
Wales (4,594)
Sorry Ireland! There are a few Irish records, but no Smiths.
There are Smith hits in 44 English counties and districts. Record types included are:
Legal Records (271,752)
Religious Records (24,920)
Genealogies (1,313)
Miscellaneous Records (3,333)
Military Records (3,143)
Periodicals (957)
School Records (1,856)
Vital Records (7,136)
Business Records (2,224)
Government Records (8,385)
Reference Materials (2,909)
Voting Records (2,715)
Migration Records (311)
Medical Records (3)
Filtering by year, most are in the 19th century.
Give it a try. Let us know if you break down any brick walls!
I’ve had only a little success and suspect until they add more collections, I won’t find a whole lot that is new which I can positively identify as referring to my ancestors. Still, it’s a start 🙂
Thanks John,
Do you have a link?
Thanks.
After logging into FamilySearch go here…
https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text