At his workshop in February, Michael Dindinger presented a workshop on FamilySearch records. One of the less well understood aspects of doing this involves finding unindexed records.
As of November 2019, there were 1.73 billion digital images published only in the FamilySearchorg Catalog.
This compares to 1.4 billion images published in the searchable
FamilySearch Historical Records Collections. As you can see from these
numbers, there are many records in the FamilySearch Catalog that are
waiting to be indexed. Just because a record is not indexed, it does not
mean that the record is not searchable. True, indexing makes the
records more readily available but unindexed records have been searched
by genealogical researchers for years.
Any genealogical search on the FamilySearch.org website is not complete without searching the Catalog for more pertinent records and then using the images available through the catalog entries to continue your search, sometimes record by record. Sometimes we get so used to having all the records indexed and searchable we forget the traditional way of searching each record for information still works for all the unindexed records.
Any genealogical search on the FamilySearch.org website is not complete without searching the Catalog for more pertinent records and then using the images available through the catalog entries to continue your search, sometimes record by record. Sometimes we get so used to having all the records indexed and searchable we forget the traditional way of searching each record for information still works for all the unindexed records.
If you are unable to attend the workshop to learn about unindexed record access, consider watching a video from YouTube that was recorded by James Tanner. It is embedded below.
