Family Search Adds New Content

I know it's been a while, but I got so excited about the new content at the Family Search Pilot Search website that I had to post.

One of the things that irritated me about the old Family Search is that they rarely had any unique content or content that I hadn't already paid for on Ancestry.com. Well, they've changed that with their new content. The content recently uploaded includes more data from death records than I've seen available anywhere else. I searched the Florida Death Records for my Reddick relatives, thinking I'd find the same information that I find on Ancestry: name, date, location. To my surprise, the records on FS have the key piece of info that helps me disambiguate the 3 Albert Reddicks I found on Ancestry: Parent Names. Also included is the cemetery name and burial place. With this new database, I've found at least 4 new records in the past 10 minutes alone.

The search interface is slick, fast and efficient. You can copy and paste the data onto your desktop in 2 clicks. I did notice a lot of spelling errors though. One way to improve the site would be to add in features to allow family members to correct some of those errors. As usual, you should search on various spellings of the names you're looking for to make up for human indexing errors.

Find the Florida Death Records and more new US records at the Family Search Pilot Site. AND, be sure to volunteer to help index records so that Family Search can put even more records online for us!

Happy searching!