At RootsTech 2024, FamilySearch announced a new full text search that uses AI to transcribe images of handwritten and typed text into machine-readable format. This allows searching before any indexing is done. It also allows the searching of relatively unstructured content, not just lists of birth, death, and marriage events.

Searching is available at https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text. You’ll need to create a FamilySearch account if you don’t already have one.

A large amount of content has been transcribed. See the full list at https://www.familysearch.org/search/full-text/collection/list.

I’ve had fun searching. The transcriptions aren’t perfect, but they are enough to access image groups that I wouldn’t have discovered any other way. I’m then happy to explore and make my own transcriptions based on the AI-provided one. Some of the dates allotted to images don’t seem to be very accurate. I’ll report on some of these discoveries in future posts.