Grow Your Family Tree
Master FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search
A new tool uses OCR to extract text from lengthy documents – and it’s completely free. Richard Holt explains how to…
US genealogy site FamilySearch has launched Full-Text Search – a tool that uses AI and optical character recognition (OCR) to search handwritten and typed documents.
Unlike traditional searches, which only look at indexed fields like names or dates, Full-Text Search scans the full text of each record. This means you can find relatives mentioned anywhere in a document — as witnesses, beneficiaries or tenants, for example — uncovering details you might otherwise never see. It contains almost two billion records from around the world. Here’s how to use it.