Searching for Unindexed Records on FamilySearch.org

At our September meeting we watched a Legacy Family Tree webinar entitled 'Another Way to Look at FamilySearch.org' by Mary Roddy - genealogist, writer and lecturer. It was difficult to fully grasp the methods of delving deeper into the unindexed records at Family Search in this quick paced video. More importantly though, there was a lot of great information to be gleaned from Mary's presentation.

She stressed the importance of reading the instructions and the index guide located at the beginning of each microfilm. We learned, and I think we'll all agree, that understanding the index guide is one of the most difficult tasks in this whole process, as each guide is a bit different and can be quite confusing. Mary, also stressed the time-saving lesson of looking over the unindexed records to determine how they are organized (i.e. alphabetically, chronologically, etc.) before beginning to search for a family record.

One of the most important aspects of this video is that it has given all of us the hope and possibility of finding that (so far) elusive family record. With a little patience and practice, I do believe that we can all master the skills we need to search through and benefit from these unindexed records.

I would like to thank Geoff Rasmussen at Legacy Family Tree website for granting us permission to show this video to our genealogy group, and to Debbie Baker for suggesting it and allowing us to benefit from her personal subscription.

From now until October 15th you can watch the video again at the Legacy Family Tree Website where you'll find it along with 14 others you can view. Take advantage of this special offer to watch and learn as much as you can on genealogy research and organization topics.

A condensed written explanation on how to find these unindexed records can also be found on Family Tree Magazine. 

Coming up in October we will have a new workshop entitled 'Tips and Tricks to Genealogy Research'. This workshop will be held on Wednesday, October 11th from 10:30 to 12:00.

In addition, we will have our Genealogy Basics workshop on Saturday, October 7th from 10:30 to 12:00. This is the first time we've held this workshop on a Saturday, so if you know of anyone who works that might be interested in attending, please let them know.

 Click here to register for either of these workshops