How to Use FamilySearch for Free Genealogy Research

FamilySearch is the single most powerful free genealogy tool on the internet. It is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has been systematically digitizing and indexing historical records from around the world for decades. The result is a free platform with billions of records — census returns, vital registrations, immigration manifests, military files, probate records, church registers — covering every inhabited continent and spanning centuries. If you're new to genealogy and haven't started here, start here.

This guide walks you through creating an account, navigating the interface, finding records, using the shared Family Tree, and unlocking the less-obvious tools that most beginners never discover.

What Is FamilySearch?

FamilySearch (familysearch.org) is a free genealogy platform with over 5 billion digitized historical records and a collaborative family tree used by millions of researchers. It was founded in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah and went online in 1999. Today it is the largest genealogy repository in the world, free to anyone with an account.

Three things make FamilySearch uniquely valuable compared to paid alternatives:

1. It's entirely free. No subscription tier, no paywall on record images. An account is required to view some images, but accounts are free.
2. The collection breadth is unmatched. FamilySearch has records from over 100 countries. It is not just an American database — it is the starting point for research on every inhabited continent.
3. The indexing is crowdsourced and continuously improving. Volunteers around the world transcribe records constantly. A collection that was browse-only last year may be fully searchable today.

The downside: because the platform is free and built on volunteer labor, the quality of indexing varies. Some collections are beautifully transcribed and fully searchable. Others are scan-only, requiring you to browse page by page. This guide will show you how to navigate both.

Creating a Free Account

Go to familysearch.org and click Create Account. You'll need an email address and a username. No church membership is required — FamilySearch is open to everyone.

A few things to do right after creating your account:

• Add yourself and your parents to the Family Tree. The platform will begin suggesting record hints immediately once it has names and dates to match against.
• Set your research location. FamilySearch personalizes some suggestions based on where your family is from.
• Install the FamilySearch Memories app (optional) if you want to scan and upload old family photos directly from your phone.

Navigating the Interface

FamilySearch's main navigation has five sections you'll use constantly:

Section	What It Does	When to Use It
Family Tree	Shared collaborative tree — your work is visible to other users	Building and navigating your family structure
Search → Records	Search the full record collection by name, date, place	Finding specific records for a known person
Search → Catalog	Browse the full library by place and record type	Discovering what collections exist for a location
Indexing	Volunteer transcription of unindexed records	Contributing back to the community
Memories	Upload and tag family photos, documents, stories	Preserving documents you already have

Key Record Collections: What FamilySearch Has

FamilySearch's U.S. collection is the strongest starting point, but the platform holds records from every region. Here's what to look for by record type:

U.S. Census Records (1790–1940)

FamilySearch has full free access to all federal census records from 1790 through 1940. The 1950 census was released in 2022 and is available through a partnership with the National Archives. Census records are one of the best starting points for any U.S. genealogy project — they capture an entire household in one document, giving you names, ages, birthplaces, and relationships. Our separate guide on how to read census records covers what each decade's census contains and how to interpret the columns.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

FamilySearch has indexed and digitized vital records from all 50 states, though coverage varies significantly by state and time period. Some states shared records early; others have restrictive access laws. Vital records from before civil registration (typically before the 1890s in the U.S.) come from church registers, which FamilySearch has in large quantities for European research especially.

Immigration and Naturalization Records

FamilySearch holds passenger lists from all major U.S. ports (1820–1957), naturalization records from federal and state courts, and border crossing records. For most of these, the images are free to view once you find the record. Our guide on finding immigration records goes deep on this record type — FamilySearch is consistently the best free starting point for immigration research.

Military Records

FamilySearch has draft registration cards, pension files, service records, and compiled military service records for U.S. conflicts from the Revolutionary War through World War II. The Civil War collections are particularly strong. Military records frequently contain physical descriptions and family information not found in civilian records.

Land and Probate Records

Land patents, deeds, wills, and estate inventories are among the most underused records in genealogy. They survive from much earlier than vital records, can document property boundaries (useful for locating your ancestor on a map), and wills frequently name children, spouses, and other relatives explicitly. FamilySearch has strong coverage for many U.S. states and for many European countries.

International Collections

FamilySearch's international holdings are its most underappreciated asset. If your family came from England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, or dozens of other countries, FamilySearch likely has records from those places — church registers, civil registration, military files, land records. Before subscribing to a country-specific service, check what FamilySearch has for free.

The FamilySearch Family Tree: Collaborative Research

The Family Tree is a single shared tree — unlike Ancestry, where every user has a separate private tree, FamilySearch maintains one tree that everyone edits together. This is both the platform's greatest strength and its biggest gotcha for new users.

Why the Shared Tree Is Powerful

When you add a person to the Family Tree who is already there (added by another researcher), you're contributing to and benefiting from their research. Record hints, source attachments, and family connections accumulated by other researchers become visible to you. For common surnames with well-researched lines, you may find decades of work already done.

The Gotcha: Anyone Can Edit

Because it's shared, anyone can change any entry — including yours. An unknown researcher may "correct" a birth date you carefully sourced, or merge a person you've verified with someone else's incorrectly identified individual. This happens regularly.

How to handle it:

• Always attach sources to every fact you add. A fact with a cited source is harder to dislodge than an unsourced claim.
• Use the Discussion tab on person pages to explain your reasoning for disputed facts.
• Watch your tree. FamilySearch will notify you of changes to people you've added if you set up notifications.
• Don't treat the shared tree as your research — treat it as a collaboration. Keep your own sourced record in a personal genealogy program.

Personal Research Trees vs. the Shared Tree

Many researchers use FamilySearch for record discovery but maintain their own private tree in desktop software (like RootsMagic or MacFamilyTree) or in a second platform. This gives you the benefits of FamilySearch's records and hints without the risk of collaborative edits overwriting your work. Our guide to the best genealogy software programs covers what's available — and if you're on a Mac, see our Mac-specific guide.

The FamilySearch Catalog: The Hidden Power Tool

Most beginners use only the Records search — they type a name, get results, look at images. That's useful, but it misses a huge portion of what FamilySearch holds. The Catalog is how you find everything else.

The Catalog is a library catalog organized by place and record type. Every collection FamilySearch holds — indexed or not — appears in the Catalog. To access it:

1. From the Search menu, choose Catalog.
2. Enter a place name — a country, state, county, or even a city.
3. Browse the record types available for that location.

What you'll find that doesn't appear in basic name searches:

• Browse-only collections — scanned but not indexed. You can view every page of a register from a specific county even if no names are searchable yet.
• Film numbers and batch numbers — unique identifiers for original microfilmed records. If someone's done research in this collection before, they may reference these numbers in published guides. Having the catalog number lets you go directly to the right film.
• Holdings notes — the Catalog entry often explains what years are covered, what's missing, what's damaged, and any access restrictions. This saves you from spending an hour searching a collection that doesn't cover your ancestor's years.

Example: You're looking for church baptismal records from a specific parish in Bavaria. A basic name search on FamilySearch may return nothing — because those records are scanned but not indexed. But the Catalog entry for that county in Bavaria will show you the exact microfilm holdings, and you can browse page by page through the image viewer. This is how serious researchers use FamilySearch.

The FamilySearch Wiki: Free Research Guides for Every Region

The FamilySearch Wiki is a free research guide covering genealogy methods and record sources for virtually every country and U.S. state. It's one of the best free genealogy research resources in existence and most beginners never touch it.

To access it, go to Search → Research Wiki, or search directly at familysearch.org/en/wiki.

What it contains:

• Step-by-step research guides by country, state, and county
• Explanations of what records exist, what they contain, and where they're held
• Links to relevant FamilySearch collections
• Guides for reading records in foreign languages
• Historical context (boundary changes, naming conventions, calendar differences)

Before you start searching for ancestors from a country you don't know well, read the Wiki article for that country first. It will tell you which record types survive, which decades have coverage gaps, and where to search. Twenty minutes with the Wiki can save hours of failed searches.

Record Hints: How FamilySearch Connects Records to People

Once you've added people to the Family Tree, FamilySearch will generate Record Hints — suggested records that may match your ancestor based on name, date, and place. Hints appear as a green leaf icon on the person's profile.

Tips for using hints effectively:

• Evaluate every hint before attaching it. Hints are algorithm-generated matches, not confirmations. A hint for "John Murphy, born 1852, Ireland" may match dozens of actual people in the records. Look at the image, read the details, confirm it's the right person.
• A hint you reject still has value. Even if the record doesn't match your ancestor, it may reveal another person of the same name — a useful negative data point that tells you your ancestor's record is somewhere else.
• Hints improve as you add more data. The more specific information you add (maiden names, specific birthplaces, middle names), the more precise the hints become.

Batch Numbers and Film Numbers: Advanced Searching

FamilySearch's original records were microfilmed over many decades. Each roll of microfilm received a unique film number. When the same records were organized into batches for indexing, each batch received a batch number. These numbers appear in the Catalog and in some indexed records.

Why they matter: If you find a death record that references a film number, you can go directly to that film in the Catalog and browse the surrounding pages — potentially finding siblings, neighbors, and other family members in the same register. Serious genealogists often research an entire microfilm rather than just the record that came up in a search.

Film and batch numbers also help when you're trying to match FamilySearch records to records on other platforms. If you find a record on Ancestry that references an original source file, the film number may let you locate the same record on FamilySearch for free.

Browsable-Only Collections: What Name Search Misses

A significant portion of FamilySearch's holdings are browsable only — scanned but not transcribed. These records don't appear in name searches at all. The only way to find records in these collections is to:

1. Find the collection in the Catalog.
2. Open the film or volume for the specific location and time period.
3. Browse manually through the scanned pages.

This sounds tedious — and it can be — but it's often the only path to records that haven't been indexed yet. Many critical collections are in this state: some county deed books, church registers from smaller parishes, probate records from rural courts, and foreign records where volunteer indexers are still working through the backlog.

The approach: use the Catalog to find the right collection, narrow to the right county and date range, and browse the images directly. If your ancestor's name is findable in the index, you'll find them faster. If the collection is browse-only, patience and systematic page-turning is the method.

When FamilySearch Isn't Enough

FamilySearch is the best free genealogy platform — but it has real limits. Knowing when to move on saves you from searching forever in the wrong place.

When to Try Ancestry

Ancestry has a larger overall record collection than FamilySearch, particularly for U.S. records and records from English-speaking countries. Its strength is also in linking records across trees — when it finds a match, it shows you how other researchers have connected that person. Check your local library for free Ancestry access before paying for a subscription.

When to Try Archives.com

Archives.com provides access to a broad range of historical records that complement FamilySearch's collection, including records from state and county archives that aren't fully digitized elsewhere. It's worth checking once you've exhausted FamilySearch and Ancestry's free options.

When to Try Newspapers.com

FamilySearch doesn't index historical newspapers. Newspapers.com has over 900 million digitized newspaper pages and is the best resource for obituaries, birth announcements, marriage notices, and local news that mentions your ancestors. Obituaries in particular often contain family information (surviving children, spouse's name, hometown) not found anywhere else.

When to Try Fold3

FamilySearch has decent coverage of U.S. military records, but Fold3 specializes in them — service records, pension files, draft cards, and casualty lists for every major U.S. conflict. If you're researching an ancestor who served in any war, Fold3 is the most direct path to their records. Many researchers find records there that don't appear anywhere else.

When to Contact Archives Directly

Not everything is digitized. Probate records, deed books, and court records at the county level are often not online anywhere. Contact the county clerk or local historical society directly. For federal records not yet online, the National Archives has a request process. FamilySearch's catalog entries often note when records are held by a specific repository — follow that lead.

For a comprehensive breakdown of free platforms beyond FamilySearch, see our guide to free genealogy websites and our guide to genealogy without Ancestry.

A Practical FamilySearch Research Workflow

Here's how to use FamilySearch systematically for a research project:

1. Add the person to the Family Tree with whatever you know: name, approximate birth year and place, parents' names if known. Let the hint engine start running.
2. Run a Records search for the person. Try name variations, use the date and place filters, check Soundex options for challenging surnames.
3. Check the Catalog for the location where your ancestor lived. Review what collections exist for that county and time period. Note any browse-only collections.
4. Read the Wiki article for that state or country. Understand what records were created, what survives, and where they're held.
5. Review all Record Hints generated by the Family Tree. Evaluate each one carefully. Attach confirmed records with proper sourcing.
6. Browse browse-only collections for the specific county and date range if name searches come up empty.
7. Follow the sources outward. A census record lists a birthplace — search FamilySearch for records from that birthplace. A ship manifest names a contact in the destination country — search for that person too.

For the broader research methodology, our 7-step genealogy research plan covers how to structure a research project from beginning to end — FamilySearch is where most of that work happens.

Related Guides in This Series

• Genealogy for Beginners: A 7-Step Research Plan
• How to Start a Family Tree
• How to Read Census Records for Genealogy
• Free Genealogy Websites
• Genealogy Without Ancestry
• Genealogy Research Mistakes Beginners Make
• Best Genealogy Software Programs
• Best Genealogy Software for Mac (2026)
• How to Find Your Ancestors' Immigration Records