My data
I cannot find my own self on here or Ancestry at all. I can find no birth record for myself. I know where I was born. I have my own heirloom hospital-issued certificate, but not one from any public anything in my hometown. I found addresses and high school photos on Ancestry, but how can a birth certificate for someone only 51 not be anywhere online, esp. not on Ancestry who brags they have over a billion records?? I'm frustrated because I'm the newest and I'm supposed to be finding birth records for people who came before me when I can't even find my own. I don't know where to look. I searched for both parents as well and nothing. I have a certified birth certificate from the Health Dept., but if I have that, how come it's not on a database? I'm new at this, so please explain however best you can, please. Advise me because I cannot afford to look up and pay for birth certificates for a bunch of people that I'll need to provide that for.
Michelle
Best Answer
-
You can find full answers to questions such as these through the FamilySearch Help Center and through googling about the various topics, but here are some answers:
1) In most states, birth records are private, confidential documents, not public. Depending on the state, sometime they are never made public, sometimes they are made public after 75 to 125 years, and in a few states they are pubic immediately. Private, confidential documents should never be online.
If you live in a state that does release the records after 125 years and if that state has a public database of such or allows someone like FamilySearch or Ancestry to create one, you should be able to find your birth certificate online in another 74 years.
Who can obtain a copy of a birth certificate also varies from state to state. In some states only the person can. In some close relatives such as parents and children can.
Here is an article that talks about the access laws in various states: https://www.usbirthcertificates.com/articles/are-birth-certificates-public (Sorry, this is a commercial site that offers to get a copy for you. But it was the first one I found. Generally the fees on such sites are really high. It's always best to just go to the county court house or at least to the state's website.)
It states that for Illinois, birth certificates are "Public only to the person on the document and immediate family." So unless the laws of Illinois change, you will never find your birth certificate online anywhere.
2) I assume when you say you uploaded a GEDCOM from Ancestry, that you created the GEDCOM, uploaded it to FamilySearch, then imported it into Family Tree. One of the limitations of this process, is that you cannot import information on living people. Also, the process tries to prevent the import of duplicate people. It will not allow the import of clear duplicates and it will not allow the import of people who have so little information on their record that the program cannot determine if there are duplicates or not. Of the 1000 people in your GEDCOM, there may be quite a few that did not import. You need to go through each of the 1000 and see if they really imported, clean up their data, and check again for duplicates.
This duplicate question is also why your mother's side now has more information than you started with. Somewhere there was a duplicate that correctly matched with your file and did get linked properly with the rest of Family Tree.
Something a lot of people don't realize, is that you do not create a tree on FamilySearch. You can only add to the existing, one world, open edit, wiki-style tree that we all work on together. The advantage of this is that we can all contribute the best information we can to make the tree as accurate as possible. In other words, your Ancestry tree of 1000 people is now a tree of 1,400,000,000 people. See: https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/online-family-tree
3) Search engines are mysterious things and too often their designers do not reveal the arcane logic behind their algorithms. It is a world where exact sometimes means kind of exact. All we can do is play around with the search criteria and try to figure out how to get the best results we can. I have found that many search engines, including that on FamilySearch, try to be too helpful in that if an exact check box is marked and that results in no matches at all, it will ignore the check box and still give non-exact results. Also, there is a new search area on FamilySearch I ran across that at this point ignores the exact boxes completely.
3
Answers
-
Also, I uploaded a full tree gedcom of over 1,000 people from Ancestry acct. and there are not even any parents for my dad, let alone another weird fact that it somehow added people on my mom's side that one branch went back to the 9th century and I didn't add those so how come those are there? I'm super perplexed here. Please help.
Also, I'm searching for myself with my birth name, which was different first name. I ticked the box for exact last name so I'm confused as to why a variation of my last name would show up. That's not exact at all.
0 -
The privacy of the living - you and me - is protected by the state/city/county regulations of the place where we were born. A few states have recent birth records online, but most don't.
Again, it depends on location. Texas and Virginia, for example, have recent birth and death records online. You may also see more recent records that someone has uploaded to a tree, but that record may not be available online.
2 -
Although not directly answering your question
I still think viewing these videos will help explain FamilySearch and how people use it.
WHY USE FAMILYSEARCH FAMILYTREE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwRSRZ9amlM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epUcr4cH_EQ
MAKING THE MOST OF FAMILYSEARCH
0 -
One post has been edited to remove personally identifiable information.
0