Searching for film/folders in the catalog for large cities

Dan Niemiec

Good day. Some time ago, familysearch was changed and it has made my catalog searching very difficult. Example, I need to find a single film in Cook County Illinois Marriage Licenses 1920-1950 which is cat=2620697. So I search for the film number, and it takes me to the collection. The way it used to work is that familysearch would display all multiple hundred films in the collection and I would use my browser CTRL-F to find that film number in the page. The change to faqmilysearch was made that after displaying a certain number of films, it says "Page 1 of 38" and you have to CTRL-F to look for the film. Nope it is not in page 1, go to page 2, CTRL-F, search for the film, nope, page 3, search, nope.....etc This situation exists for my Bari Italy 1866-1929 and all my Chicago and Cook County vital records. It takes many many searches to find one film amongst those huge collections.

There needs to be a way for us to decide to load the entire collection results all at once.

Or when we search the catalog for a film number and choose the collection, it should take us directly to page 32 of the 38 pages and that way we can CTRL-F only once.

Or when we search for a film number, take us directly to the images for that film.

Or when we search for a film number, take us to the records search page that only includes that film/folder.

Any of these ideas would be an improvement on how it is done now.

I'm sure the change was made to not have the servers returning all these huge results every time we search, but we need a better way to get directly to the film images we need.

Thank you.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

If the records have been indexed, then your last idea is already possible: go to Search - Records, click More Options, scroll down, click "+ Image Group Number (DGS) or Film Number", put in the film number, and click Search.