Finding the right film image

Michael B. Greenstreet Jr.

I received a record hint for an ancestor's birth information. Clicking on the hint brings up another page. On the left of that page is the information about the indexed source:

clicking the source brings up the digital pictures of the birth records.

Is there a way that I can search for and quickly find the page that contains my ancestor's information or do I have to scroll through each of these pages?

Thanks so much for the help.

Paul W

Here is the direct link to the film in question.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/film/007578186?cc=4149585&cat=777933

From having a quick look, it might indeed require having to scroll through until you have found the record you are seeking. In some cases, an alphabetical or chronological listing can make it relatively easy to get at least close to the actual page, but the layout of these records would seem to make this a bit difficult in this case.

Providing the name / location / date details here might make it easier for others to judge - or even help you in getting to the page more quickly than I am (pessimistically) suggesting.

Michael B. Greenstreet Jr.

So I found the page via a separate record hint. It was the same information but in that particular source it named the page number. I wish there was a search feature or maybe a filter wherein if given the vital information, one could search for that and the program could examine all the original documents and finds hits for that information, not too dissimilar with what was able to occur during the indexing of the 1950 federal census.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The Document Information doesn't provide any further clues, but no, you don't need to scroll through every page: films are almost never arranged randomly.

I started with typing in the URL from your screenshot (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VRR9-Z2H) so that I could see the indexed information: the name, date, and place. Then I looked at a random image on the film and checked the "Information" tab at the bottom; this told me that the film started with some Charlotte County births, then continued with Chesterfield County births, starting in 1853. Florence's birth is indexed as 1878 in Chesterfield, so I could guess that it was probably not at the very beginning. I went to image 300 as a first stab, and it contained Chesterfield county births from 1872. (I noticed that the names look partly alphabetized: M comes before N comes before P, but Nugent comes before Noise.) So then I checked image 400, and it was 1880. That's pretty close, so I tried 375, and that was 1878, but surnames starting with H to L, so I paged ahead until I got to the Ws, and found Florence Wilson on line 341 of image 379 (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-89XF-ZPRM?i=378&cc=4149585).

So I ended up looking at a total of eight images out of the 569. There was a little bit of luck involved, in that my "first stab" was already in the right county and decade, but even without that, in a reasonably-well-organized record set like this, we're talking a dozen images to look at, tops. (Assuming the indexing is correct. Typos Can Make Life Very Fun. Not. Ask me how I know.)

Michael B. Greenstreet Jr.

Thank you so much. This helps tremendously