My Wish Has Come True For An Every Name Index to Deeds at FamilySearch!

United States Wills and Deeds Experimental Search

What have I been wishing for years now? An every name index for deeds! I've been hoping for this for ages, and guess what? FamilySearch made my wish come true with their new OCR search that works as an every name index. How awesome is that?

It actually also is a will index, and brings up other types of records too. 

It's about as accurate as the old newspapers indexed with OCR.  It can be a bit hit and miss because of messy handwriting and fading text. But hey, no system is perfect!

Also if your ancestral area prohibits FamilySearch from making their records available from anywhere you won't be able to see the actual documents, unless you visit the FamilySearch Library or a Family History Center. As you can see below one search result brought up one blank document. 

The second result, brought up by my surname search, did return an actual document. You can click on the transcript to see a transcribed copy of the document or just view the actual image of the original document. 

 

When you do view the original documents pages sometimes your search names are surrounded by red dotted lines, which are helpful. 

Oddly, sometimes, you can't turn the pages once you're on the image. That's a problem if your document is multiple pages. Also, these limited pages, don't have additional information so you can find the microfilm in the catalog. Most pages do, however, allow you to turn the pages and provide information about the source. 

If I don't find what I'm looking for with one search, I brainstorm!  I just tweak the search a bit. I was looking for a deed related to my several times great-grandfather, and at first, I couldn't find it. I then searched using his wife's name instead and it came up! 

I've been researching my family history for over 20 years and still I've found new information using this search. 

For instance I found a brief will for a 3 times great-grandfather. In all these years I've research I missed it somehow? 

One piece of information scared me. I worried I identified the wrong family for my ancestor Nancy Melvin-Hicks. When searching for Nancy Melvin I found a will for James Blades. He  said his sister was Nancy Melvin. I wondered if my Nancy Melvin married before and I was wrong about her parents being John Melvin and Mary Redden. Actually when the will was written my Mary Redden was married to Elijah Hicks. 

I wanted to make sure so I researched this other family. I figured Melvin would have been Nancy's married name. I searched for a Melvin marrying a Blades and only found someone marrying after the will was written. I finally discovered Nancy Melvin was married to William Melvin and it was her second marriage, that's why I couldn't find a Blades/Melvin marriage before.

I've paged through countless deed books in my quest to learn about my ancestors. I don't have all the time in the world to go through hundreds of books from my ancestral areas. That would take forever! It would probably take indexers a lifetime to create every name indexes for all those deed books. That's a massive task!

So, a big thank you to FamilySearch for this innovative OCR search feature. It might not be perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.