Alternative to Searching a Film

When you are looking at a Person Page in FamilyTree and click on “Search Records” (see earlier posting), you will open up a new browser tab in FamilySearch.org and see a listing of “Search Results from Historical Records” under a summary of the automatically selected search parameters.

[As a side note, you could (maybe should) go over to the left side and change those automatically selected search parameters, (for example, you could add the spouse's name or the parent's names) and click on Search again.]

[As another side note, if the list of possible records of interest is very long, you can now summarize the list by clicking on the new “Collections” tab to the right of the “Records” tab near the top of the page. This will create a shorter summarized list of records, wherein you can select the category of records that you are most interested in perusing. This is faster that scrolling down through all of the pages in the list.]

Getting back to the point of this posting, when you find a pertinent record, click on the record (as though you were going to add it to your Source Box – see earlier posting) and scroll down to see the Batch #. If you click on this batch#, you will open up a search window for that batch, which typically has thousands of records. This batch is the transcribed version of the film in the Family History Library (the film number is also shown right below the batch number). You can go over to the left and enter in pertinent search parameters (such as the given name and surname of the person you had just done the “Search Records” for in FamilyTree, or that person's parents, or that person's marriage place/date, or whatever) and click on Search. All of the new search results will be records from this particular batch/film.

You can see that this technique involves searching a film without renting that film and turning the crank. It is usually helpful to also do a search for other related ancestors in that batch.