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Genealogy Search Engine

Find out what types of records are searched and what countries are covered by the Genealogy Search Engine. Also find out why you should use it to complement searches done on subscription websites like Ancestry and FindMyPast.

A couple of reasons:

• The Genealogy Search Engine is free.

• The Genealogy Search Engine focuses exclusively on the thousands of websites from around the world that contain free ancestral records. Many of these websites receive little visibility from major search engines like Google.

• We estimate that roughly 80% of the ancestral records covered by the Genealogy Search Engine cannot be found on subscription genealogy websites such as Ancestry, FindMyPast or even FamilySearch. These records have been put online by regional libraries, universities, colleges, local governments, local cemeteries, genealogy societies and individuals. In other words, a significant number (in fact billions) of these ancestral records are unique to the Genealogy Search Engine.

Subscription websites tend to focus on census records and birth, marriage, death records. The Genealogy Search Engine has those types of records.

In addition, the Genealogy Search Engine covers a diverse set of other types of ancestral records only partially covered by subscription websites. This would include such things as historic images, newspapers, obituaries, city directories, immigration records, ship transcripts, letters, wills, papers, biographies, historic court cases, deeds, household lists, land records, property lists, tithe lists, estate records, tradesmen lists, alumni records, stent rolls, voice recordings, military burials, slave lists, military enlistment lists, passenger manifests, historic accident lists, rare books and films, settler lists, taxpayer lists, land patent records, etc. We even cover monument inscriptions.

Many people use the Genealogy Search Engine to complement searches done on Ancestry, FindMyPast and FamilySearch because the Genealogy Search Engine covers a diverse set of records often not found on the major genealogy websites.

Very popular. The Genealogy Search Engine gets well over a million queries a year.

It is the leading independent genealogy search engine in the world and the leading free alternative to subscription genealogy websites. The Genealogy Search Engine is very popular with reference librarians and genealogists who are looking for new leads to their ancestors.

To get the most out of the Genealogy Search Engine, read the article A Guide to Performing Online Genealogy Searches

Yes. Free genealogy records do exist on the internet. They just tend to be scattered across many obscure archival websites. Our search technology helps brings them all together into one convenient location.

We search a few thousand websites known to contain free ancestral records.

Included are all the most popular free record websites like Chronicling America, US Genweb, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, Billion Graves, Genealogy Trails, Ancient Faces, UK National Archives, Irish National Archives, Australia's Trove system, multiple national libraries from around the world, multiple national archives in Europe and elsewhere, national and regional gazettes.

We also search the massive archive.org and archives of various genealogical societies from around the world, regional libraries, university collections, newspaper collections, war heritage websites, ship records, city directories and more local collections than we can count.

We are also the only search engine that covers the massive Google Newspaper Archive, which is reason enough alone to use the Genealogy Search Engine.

The Genealogy Search Engine covers records from the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, all of western Europe and most of eastern Europe.

We also cover small collections (a couple of million records each) from Israel, South Africa, Singapore and the Caribbean.

Basically, if there are free genealogy records available on the internet from any country in any language in the world and we know about them then we will try to cover them.

Below is a rough guide to the number of records searched by country:
• United States - greater than 2 billion records.
• Canada - greater than 100 million records.
• England, Scotland, Wales - greater than 100 million records.
• Ireland - greater than 25 million records.
• Australia - greater than 250 million records.
• New Zealand - greater than 25 million records.

The balance of the records are primarily from Europe with small collections from other parts of the world.

Yes we do. The Genealogy Search Engine picks up most new obituaries within 24 hours of being posted on the internet.

The Genealogy Search Engine is a convenient one stop location to find recent obituaries of relatives and loved ones. It saves you the effort of having to hunt all over the internet for recent obituaries.

Tens of thousands of new records are indexed every day.

The Genealogy Search Engine usually picks up new records within 24-48 hours of when they first appear on the internet.

That's up to you. Many people run their queries on the Genealogy Search Engine once a month to stay on top of all the latest records.

In addition to continuously indexing new records on existing ancestral websites, we also add batches of new ancestral websites to the Genealogy Search Engine usually once a quarter.

No. Subscription websites put up firewalls to prevent their records from being searched by outside parties.

Ancestral records are typically owned by various governments (such as census records) or religious organizations (such as parish records). Many governments and other organizations are now putting these records on the internet free of charge. The Genealogy Search Engine finds and indexes these records for you.

We have a dedicated specialist looking for new ancestral record websites on the internet.

We also get a lot of leads from readers and users of our search engine.

If you want to know if a particular website is indexed by the Genealogy Search Engine, type the following into the search box:

smith site:yoursite.com

where you substitute yoursite.com with the name of the website.

If you find a website that is not covered by the Genealogy Search Engine then please drop us a line at letusknow@genealogyintime.com and we will try to index it.

It does cost a lot of money to run and maintain free search engines. We do it because we have a passion for genealogy and a determination to make it better.

We have a small number of Google ads on our website. This helps cover some of the cost. We also ask people to click on the Amazon link at the bottom of our home page before buying something from Amazon (in the US, Canada, the UK or Germany). It just takes 3 seconds and we earn a small referral commission at no cost to you if you (or a friend/family member) buy something.

The Genealogy Search Engine works just like Google. You enter search terms like you would if you were using Google. Start by entering your ancestor's name.

Not at all. You can search by name, date, town, occupation, event, etc.

Basically, you can search by any information you think might be included with your ancestor's name.

Read the article A Guide to Performing Online Genealogy Searches to learn how to do a detailed genealogy search.

We don't have the resources to spend the time looking up specific individuals.

This is the current limit of the search engine.

There are 8 results per page times 10 pages equals 80 unique results in total.

If you want more results, consider narrowing your search using the techniques in the article A Guide to Performing Online Genealogy Searches.

Don't worry, you haven't lost any results.

The Genealogy Search Engine actually goes through the results twice. The first time it delivers all the results to you. This is done so that you get the results as quickly as possible.

When you start clicking through to the details, the search engine actually goes through the results a second time and removes any duplicates. This is how 10 pages of first results can become 4 pages of final results.

We do this because we know your time is valuable and we don't want you to waste it wading through page after page of duplicate results.

Yes it does. In fact, our entire website works well on mobile devices.

Genealogy is no longer just for the desktop. The next time you have ten minutes to spare, try pulling out your phone and looking up a few ancestors.

For privacy reasons, we do not track your individual searches. We have no way to retrieve your specific search results.