52 Weeks To Better Genealogy – Challenge 10
Investigate Family Search Pilot, which is part of FamilySearch.org. This is a wonderful collection of records which literally grows every day. In the middle left of the page is a link that says “Browse our record collections.” Click it and pick a region. Search collections outside your research interest. Investigate the types of records collected all over the world and see how they differ from those with which you are familiar. If you are a genealogy blogger, pick a type of record from another country and share your observations about it.
This challenge runs from Saturday, 6 March 2010 through Friday, 12 March 2010.
I decided to see what was available for Spanish records.
I have an ancestor from Spain, but I was lucky enough to have been handed a professional report on his line, from another researcher. Lucky for me, that was in my first months of family history research. It consisted of birth, baptismal, and marriage dates dating back to the early 1600s.
Since I already had this information, I have never bothered to look into Spanish records.
I went to the website and clicked on browse records. I chose the region my family lived: Herencia, Ciudad Real, Spain and then their church: Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion.
I was amazed to see that the same records which the professional genealogist had used to research my family (which were on microfilm) are now digitized and available here online.
Even though the report was very thorough, it did not include deaths or confirmations. This gives me something to search for!
Now if I had only studied Spanish instead of German and Russian. It’s going to be hard for me to decipher the records, but I should be able to pick out the names with some work and then I can save the images and go from there.
There are indexes for the births and marriages, but not for the deaths and confirmations. That means that I’m going to have to go through hundreds and hundreds of pages to find my ancestors. It will be worth it though to get their death dates.
It looks like I have another “to do” to add to my list. Although I don’t have enough time to sift through the pages at the moment, at least I now know that these records are readily available to me online.
What a great find!
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