FamilySearch AI Tool

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash

I haven’t talked about much about using AI for genealogy and perhaps we’ll delve more into that another time. In some ways we are already using AI with search engines and other tools. FamilySearch has an AI Experiment that you can try. Let’s look.

You can get to the search field by going here: FamilySearch Labs • FamilySearch  Then go to the box that says try searching in full text and choose Try the experiment. You will then see a search bar where you can type whatever you want to search for. After that, you’ll see the familiar search of Keyword and ancestor’s name. It is an experiment so this tool isn’t always available and will evolve as more information becomes available. The cool thing is that you can search by name in documents that have never been indexed.
 
This is the link to the first search bar: Full-Text Search • FamilySearch. You can get more refined results by using quotation marks to get an exact search. Once you do this, you’ll see the option to add the keywords and as noted about the ancestor or person’s name. Not all records are available in the search but I had great luck finding documents when searching land records in the County of Grey, Ontario, Canada. I had found many of these records the old-fashioned way by looking up the land index and noting the instrument numbers and searching through the digital books. It was rewarding to find the documents this way—especially if you weren’t sure where your ancestor lived. In addition, I found probate records for some other relatives in Canada. I should note that there is an option to filter your results by collection, year, place ,and  record type as there may be many pages of results to sort through.
 
I didn’t have as much luck looking for relatives in the United States but I suspect that is because not all records are available for search yet. Having said that, I did find a couple of land deeds for a relative in Minnesota. I would say that it doesn’t hurt to search…you never know what you might find. Here is a detailed article about using this search that you might find useful if you’d like to read more before jumping in. FamilySearch's New AI Tool Makes Unindexed Records Searchable (familyhistorydaily.com)
 
There are other experiments to explore. I hope this has given you a fun tidbit for searching in FamilySearch. I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to refine this tool to better help us search all those records. Happy Exploring!