Full-Text Search: Finding Ancestors in Handwritten Deeds, Wills and Court Records

Computer handwriting recognition has made millions of unindexed pages searchable for the first time. How FamilySearch's full-text search works, how to search it well, and its limits.

3 min read

For decades, the biggest barrier in genealogy was the index. If no one had indexed a record by name, you had to browse it page by page. That is changing fast. FamilySearch has used computer handwriting recognition (a form of artificial intelligence) to read millions of pages of old handwritten records and make every word searchable. This "full-text search" is one of the most important new tools in genealogy, especially for deeds, wills and court records.

What full-text search is

A traditional index lists only key facts: a name, a date, a place. Full-text search reads the whole page. That means you can search for:

• Any name on the page, including witnesses, neighbors, heirs and enslaved people named in a deed or will
• Places and landmarks, like a creek or a church
• Phrases, like "my daughter Mary" or "heirs of John Smith"

FamilySearch introduced full-text search through its experimental FamilySearch Labs, starting with U.S. land and probate records, and has been expanding to other record types and countries. Check FamilySearch's website for where the tool lives now and which collections it covers.

How to search well

• Use quotation marks for exact phrases: "John Miller" finds those words together.
• Search variations. Clerks wrote "Jno." for John, "Wm." for William, "Jas." for James, and "Thos." for Thomas. Try both. See Nicknames and Naming Patterns.
• Search the surname alone with a place filter. A misread first name won't hide the record.
• Filter by place, date and record type to cut thousands of hits to a few dozen.
• Search for neighbors and associates, not just your ancestor. A deed between two neighbors may mention your ancestor's line. See The FAN Club.
• Search for relationship phrases plus the surname: "son of," "daughter," "wife of," "heirs," "guardian."

Always read the original image

The computer's transcription is a finding aid, not the record. Handwriting recognition makes mistakes, especially with faded ink, unusual spellings and old letter forms. Names are often misread, and an entire line may be garbled. When you find a hit:

1. Open the image and read the original yourself.
2. Read the whole document, and the pages before and after it.
3. Transcribe the important parts in your own words, and cite the original record book and page, not the search tool.

Need help reading the handwriting? See Reading Old Handwriting and Dates in Early Records.

What it's best for

• Deeds, which name buyers, sellers, neighbors, witnesses, and sometimes heirs and their relationships. See Land Records.
• Wills and estate records, which name family members and sometimes enslaved people. See Wills and Probate.
• Court minutes and order books, full of guardianships, apprenticeships, road orders and lawsuits that were almost never indexed.
• Researching enslaved ancestors, whose names appear in deeds, wills and inventories that indexes skipped. See Researching Enslaved Ancestors Before 1870.

Limits to keep in mind

• Not everything is covered yet. If a search comes up empty, the record may simply not be in the collection. Check the FamilySearch catalog too (see Mastering the FamilySearch Catalog).
• Missed words. A name the computer misread won't come up in any search. A negative result doesn't prove a record doesn't exist.
• Too many results. Common names can return thousands of hits. Narrow by place and date, or add a second name you'd expect on the same page.

Other full-text tools

Full-text search isn't only at FamilySearch. Newspaper sites, digitized books on Google Books, HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, and many state digital archives also search every word of their collections. See Free Digital Libraries and Getting More from Old Newspapers.