A New Way to Find a Record About Your Ancestor

FindaRecord.com is a fairly new website designed to make finding online record resources for your ancestor's from multiple websites easier. Although the site is still in Beta, it seems to perform well in locating record resources currently online. 
The way the site works is by geography. You go to the site, findarecord.com, and click on the Search Now button. You'll then go to a page with a Google Map at the top (see below). Click in the search box at the top of the map and enter a location that you're looking for records for, in the example below I've entered "Indianapolis, Indiana." 
You'll notice to the right of the screen is a form with a series of buttons. You can choose a date range by typing the years in the "From" and "To" boxes. You can narrow or broaden the type of records you're searching for by clicking whether you want to view records from "Free" or "Paid" sites. You can select the type of record by clicking on "Birth" "Marriage" "Death" "Census" "Military" "Misc". You can search for records that are offline (think the Family History Library Catalog) also by clicking the "Offline" button. 

When you're ready to see the search results, click the orange "Search" button. You'll then see a list of records below the map. that looks like this:

The list can be very long and will list the basic name of the record collection and the website it's found on. If you click on the Details button, you'll see a screen that will give you more information about the record collection without leaving the findarecord.com site.

By clicking the "View" button, you'll open another browser tab and go to the web site where the record collection resides, so if you select "Paid" sites, you may be visiting sites that require a fee or subscription. 

But There's More!

You can also download a Google Chrome Extension (see screenshot below). With the extension, when you're on FamilySearch.org in the Person View you'll see a little blue tab to the left of your screen with "B M D" for "Birth" "Marriage" "Death". If you click on any of those letters it will open a tab and search for record collections that match the geographic information you have in Family Tree for that person and the time period of the event. Furthermore, if you then click one of the record collections "View" buttons, it will enter the information from Family Tree in your search box along with the dates and places and attempt to find records in the collection that match your person. "Attempt" is an important word here, because at this time the system uses the maiden names for women in the search, so you would have to manually go back in and update your search results by changing the surname to the married name to find many of the records for women.

Offline Record Searching

I did a quick test to locate offline records for Indianapolis, Indiana and my results were not exactly what I hoped for. I was searching for Marriage Records for Indianapolis, Marion County, Indiana and the search didn't narrow down enough and I had too many results to wade through. Most of the records were for the Family History Library Catalog listing, and I liked the fact that they are attempting to search the Catalog for me without having to go to the Catalog web page, but the results need some refining. I need to remember that this is still Beta, the concept is great. 

Summary

I think this may be a very valuable tool as they continue to refine it's capabilities and connections with various web sites. For many LDS researchers who will begin getting access to Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and FindMyPast.com over the next few months, this tool may become incredibly useful for quickly finding out which sites have records for your ancestor online. If it works well, and it looks like it's headed that direction, you should be able to more quickly locate the record collections you're looking for and ultimately find a record about your ancestor. On the negative side, I think the type is too large in the titles of the results - most of the titles of the collections I get back in my search results are too long to fit on the screen and get cut off (and I'm on a fairly good sized monitor). Overall this is an exciting new tool that I'll be experimenting with over the next few weeks. Check it out at findarecord.com!