Enable users to search by witnesses on Records

BrandonHinds1

Something I find that would be really useful is being able to enter the name of someone and find documents which their names appear on as witnesses.

For Jamaican records birth and death records usually have one witness while marriage records have two. These witnesses are usually family (if not close friends) and being able to search what records they witness can help in locating other family members/ancestors.

genthusiast

Generally I agree - it would be nice to have indexing produce a more complete/searchable transcription of the record.

But the indexing of records is governed by contract - so apparently most record custodians seemingly only want them searchable by the 'primary part(y/ies)'. Since the other person(s) are sometimes not identifiable I think excluding others is so that the searchable index databases are not 'larger' (yes I don't know particularly how another column or two would affect database size, etc.).

So what this means for the researcher: Produce and include your own transcription of the record (if only for preservation in your language) - and attach that in the Reasons for attaching/Notes - when linking the record with person(s) in the Tree. If other person(s) are identifiable - attach the Source to them as well.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Yes, it would be useful to be able to find all of the baptisms where one's relative was a godparent, or all of the weddings where he was a witness, but indexing is a time-consuming endeavor. Adding more fields (names) to an index increases the time almost exponentially. This is why most indexes do not include these "peripheral" names.

Herman Autore

I agree with the original poster, adding witnesses from baptisms and weddings is not only helpful, but crucial. The confidence we can assign to a match is limited by the number of coinciding attributes. Often times names are hard to index because they are hard to read, but when you have more names you can still make a match with confidence because you know that godparent or witness is a friend or relative. In my research I've noticed on relative is mentioned in more than four weddings for a set of children. And this is where witnesses and godparents are even more important, they allow us to discover relatives. The more clues we can connect, the more people we can add to our tree, and the more confident we can be of the work we've done.

I'm curious to know what these legal or contractual limitations are. Can you provide more information, @genthusiast?

Thanks,

Herman

genthusiast

@Herman Autore

If indexing fields are not included - then they were not included 'in the contract' - the indexing fields are agreed to with the Record Owner/Custodian.

FamilySearch Community commonly refers to the index as 'a finding aid' - it makes the record findable by a corresponding search on the indexed fields. Once the record is found - then yes, the researcher can make a transcript in their Notes to include whichever conclusions they draw from the witnesses, etc. into the Family Tree.