My attention was grabbed by a hint from Fiona Brooker during the Legacy Family Tree Webinars presentation, Foundations in AI for Family History 4 of 5: Smart Tools—AI Helpers for Genealogy Tasks, on Wednesday evening.
Fiona mentioned getting 61 hits when searching at home for an ancestor on FamilySearch Full Text Search. The same search at a Family Search Affiliate Library yielded 91 hits.
I tried it myself at the Ottawa Stake Family History Centre, now officially termed a FamilySearch Centre. Here are the hit counts for five people.
| Person | Home | FHC |
| WHN | 16 | 29 |
| PM | 482 | 544 |
| JR | 1,299 | 2,042 |
| JDA | 51 | 192 |
| JM | 1,165 | 1,494 |
The median is 57% more hits at the FHC.
When searching for a place name, the number of hits jumped from 10,133 to 29,409.
I didn’t have time to do more than sample the hits. One, revealed at the FHC and not found during a home search, was an extensive will left by a wealthy two-time widow who had no children of her own.
I’ll have to remember to try the same searches at an affiliate library. If you try it please pop your experience into the comments.
The full text search results appear to respect the licensing restrictions of the collections on FamilySearch. That means if an item is only viewable from a FamilySearch Centre or Affiliate, it won’t be included in the results returned when one does a full text search from home. I first stumbled into this a few months ago when I was doing full text searches of various Glasgow cemeteries.
I had absolutely no idea about this. It makes sense but it didn’t occur to me that this could be the situation. Another “you don’t know what you don’t know” moment. Thank you so much for sharing this. 57% more is a lot!
Ken is correct – from home, we only see results in unrestricted FamilySearch collections. It’s very frustrating, but there you have it. I have taken to going to work early to use FTS and download records.
Wow! Wonderful tip! It seems obvious now that I think about it. I will be redoing my searches at our local genealogy society which is an affiliate.
Is there was a way to filter the results to only those not available at home?
I learned this when I took an Ancestor Seekers junket to Salt Lake City and learned there is so much we cannot access at home but is available at the affiliate libraries.