A few hours late today resulted in some new deeds and ancestral names in deeds of other people. All the names are rarely indexed until now. Searching by name and place in digitized records was easy peasy. Thank you, FamilySearch! I have used this excellent, but not perfect, advancement a few times now and I can describe it in one word. WOW. Fantastic news from RootsTech today.

FamilySearch Labs are basically experimental/beta products that are more than previews, but yet not ready for FamilySearch to say “all finished, all good!” I was amazed at the excellent accuracy in the reading of the documents. Sure some issues arose, but comparatively few. I recognized the county name on some records, but some took a quick look to be sure what the heck the records clerk wrote back in the 19th century. I saw the county name of Winona in Minnesota constantly the victim of poor handwriting in the docs. The “Expand your search with Full Text” part of the Labs does not include deeds or wills that FamilySearch has not had previous access to. Doggone it. I need a few more counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin, plus more years in the ones that are available. My blame is on the record holders, not FamilySearch.

Try it out https://www.familysearch.org/labs/. If you are on social media, you likely saw many posts about this new tool today.

Read more about this really neat advancement courtesy of Artificial Intelligence and I am sure, many hours of behind the scenes work by FamilySearch personnel. The Labs have some additional sections but I have not yet previewed them .https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/familysearch-labs

p.s. My colleague Kimberly Powell has already written tips for using the full-text search: https://learngenealogy.com/familysearch-experimental-full-text-search/

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