The world's best genealogy search engine?

A customer recently emailed us a great question: What’s the best online search engine for genealogists?

The short answer: It depends what you’re searching for. Vital records? Photos? Census returns? Military service records? Free genealogy records? Family trees? International documentation from Brazil, Belgium, or Burma? Different needs lead to different sources.

That said, if we could only pick only one website to perform genealogy-related searches, it would be FamilySearch. Here’s why:

• It is a superb general resource for genealogy, and it is completely free, as this statement on the About page declares: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provides FamilySearch free of charge to everyone, regardless of tradition, culture, or religious affiliation.”
• For certain categories, it’s the largest online source of genealogy records. This includes African American records.
• New records are added every month, including international indexes and documents. You can see the latest additions here.
• The FamilySearch wiki is one of the best ways to get a lay of the land when delving into a specific location, whether it be local documents from Baja California, Illinois military files, or Polish religious records.

FamilySearch has other advantages. Not only can it help you search through its own extensive holdings, but it can also be used to comb through other non-FamilySearch resources such as Find-A-Grave.

Recent advances with full-text search (see 5 reasons we ❤️ full-text search) and other development projects means that FamilySearch will only get better in terms of unearthing previously hard-to-find information in wills, deeds, court records, and other sources.

Is FamilySearch perfect? No. The FamilySearch unified family tree has some major problems, and its DNA features are very thin. But when it comes to search, FamilySearch is hard to beat.