Family Search - Full Text Search

[FluffyDiplodocus]

Wanted to share something I found this past week - www.familysearch.org/search/full-text - it's entirely possible everyone already knows about this and I'm late to it! But FamilySearch have a full text search on some of their records now, it's a beta project and isn't perfect or complete, but I've found some absolutely brilliant things on it in the past week. Nothing that's broken down brick walls yet, but some fabulously interesting finds in poor law and court records that I would never trawl through on the off chance I'd find something relevant. I've spent a very happy morning today digging through some Somerset Quarter Sessions and learning about my 5x great-grandfather's life of crime and wanted to spread the word :)

Thanks for this. I've just been having a quick look at it and it seems to be really useful. (In addition to it being free as well).

I've got subscriptions to both Ancestry and FindMyPast and a lot of what I found when I was checking this out is also on those two websites. But with this being free it is certainly a bonus for people who don't subscribe to those websites.

I did find some records though that weren't on those two websites. You mentioned poor law records and court records and, interestingly, it was also poor law records I came across here that I haven't found elsewhere.

So it's definitely been very useful.

A lot of the records here seem to be secondary sources but it's certainly helped me find some things that I haven't otherwise been able to find through Ancestry or FindMyPast. Thank you for sharing this.

Thank you as well! I just tried searching with my grandad's full name in inverted commas, and came up with someone's will, proved in Cheshire in 1914. It turns out that my uncle was the testator's godson. She left him £20!

The whole original will is there in a scan, along with a transcription. I guess the handwriting was transcribed using OCI. Amazing! I can see I'll be trying some more names!