Monday, September 3, 2018

Using FamilySearch Export function in Slovakian and Hungarian records






FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) have some new developments at their website. One of the most amazing tool is the EXPORT functions of records. If you use spreadsheets to organize your family genealogy in any fashion, you will accomplish much by downloading the exports into spreadsheets and adjusting them to make sense on the worksheets. It beats data entry and it saves time. Once you master the cleaning up of the spreadsheets after the export, you will have a nice arrangement of data.

If you are doing a one-place study, you can export all the indexed records (with their transcriptions errors) that are available. For instance, I am working with the surname of "Adam" in the village of Szilas, in Abaúj-Torna, in Hungary. I go to the Hungary Catholic records collection at FamilySearch. I plug the surname ADAM in the surname field and then, I put  SZILAS in the residence place field. Many Adams come up, so I click on any Adam from SZILAS and a record comes up. I then click on the GSU batch number located in the right sidebar as "GSU 62336 ". Up pops all of these people with birth records in SZILAS. You will see that there are 22,653 records indexed in Szilas . Do I want all these records? Absolutely not but I can have fun looking at all of them if I have a whole day.

As the surname ADAM begins with " A", I click through to see how many pages of ADAMS there are in this SZILAS collection. I have an option in " Number of results to show"; I select 75. I can also replace the number 75 with the number 100 in the URL field if I want to see 100 records. It will not go further than 100, though.

Then, I click EXPORT ! Presto. It's that easy.  By the way, the EXPORT function only works if you SIGN IN with an account. You do not have to be an LDS member to have an account. Another important thing to notice is that each individual set of collection has a different interface of fields. For instance, Hungary Reformed did not have a residence place field but Hungary, Civil Registration, 1895-1980 had one.

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