Saturday Night Genealogy FUn

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It’s Saturday Night again – 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  How many “Wills” for your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ surnames are on the FamilySearch Full Text Search feature (see https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text)?  

2)  List the surnames and how many entries there are when you do an exact name search.  What does this tell you?  Have you found Wills for all of your ancestors with these names?

3)   Share a link to your blog post, or your Facebook Status  post, on this post.

I followed the same procedure that Randy Seaver outlined in his blog post:

NOTE:  FamilySearch has been adding more data to the Wills collections.  Here’s how I did mine:

*  On the Full-Text Search page (https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text), I put my “Seaver” surname in quotes (to make it exact).

*  I then used the “Record Type” filter to select “Legal Records.”  

*  Then on the “Legal Records” filter, I selected “Wills” to show only the records in that category.

Since some of my ancestral surnames are spelled in various ways on records, I did the search for both spellings.

• Crawford – 66,386
• Hammond – 27,352
• Currey – 2,782 / Curry – 37,582
• Hutchinson – 21,093 / Hutchison – 13,579
• Briles – 402 / Broyles – 2,719
• Ricketts – 5,160
• Mentzer – 863
• Wells – 75,416

One word of caution: Performing this same search at an affiliate library or a family history center will increase the results. If a record is locked at home, it is likely locked for this search. By using an affiliate library, the record may become unlocked, thus increasing the number of results.