#Familysearch.org igi free
However, with the search engines on the above websites you can now search by name first (in the old days you had to load the fiche for the county, and scroll through the lists of names).į is the free website where you can search the I.G.I. The IGI is an index of mainly parish register entries – mostly of baptisms and marriages (and a few burial records), arranged by county and then alphabetically by surname. The index is available for anyone researching their family history, and you can access it online at and also on .uk. It is compiled by its members in order that their ancestors can be baptised. The IGI is a computerised project run by the Church of the Latter Day Saints which was first published in 1973.
#Familysearch.org igi how to
My purpose in this post is to clarify exactly what the IGI is, and how to use it professionally, to eradicate error. This is dangerous, and can lead to wrong information. But do people actually realise this? I have a feeling that people use IGI information as if it was an original source. In fact, when I am searching specifically for IGI records, I am aware that probably most people do not even realise that they are searching the IGI, or even that it is an index.įor one thing, if you use a programme like Ancestry to search for baptisms, the results will be a mixture of original parish register copies, and the IGI – which will not give you the original copy. Since the internet, and since the IGI is now online, I can see that the approach to the IGI is very different to what it used to be. If you found them on the IGI, then you would then look at the relevant parish to get the original record. Very often the County Record Offices only had the fiches for their own and nearby counties, but the IGI could be very useful if your missing ancestor had come from a neighbouring parish. Once upon a time, before the internet, when you had laboriously gone through the original parish registers at the local record office, and found your ancestor missing, your next port of call would be to look at the International Genealogical Index (IGI) on microfiche to see if you could find them nearby.