FamilySearch Full-Text Search ... and other AI processes for reading old handwritten documents

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a more prevalent technique for transcribing old documents, in particular, that for handwritten text. Programs are growing in number for very old records and for use in many languages.

The process revolves around Optical Character Recognition for written or printed documents that were created using old handwriting or printing styles. The idea was to create a digital library or memory of letter and word shapes that could then be compared to new, scanned images to produce an interpretation of what the document contained. The results would be applicable to reading single pages or entries (of interest to genealogists) to mass conversion of documents containing a multitude of pages stored in archives. The objectives are to do so quickly, easily and accurately.

FamilySearch Full-Text Search

One feature that has caught the eye of genealogists lately is the Full-Text Search function developed by FamilySearch that has expanded options for searching handwritten documents in the thousands of collections and millions of images it has in its digital library.

Full-Text Search, introduced in 2024, is a part of a group of experimental programs which are part of FamilySearch Labs “where you can explore emerging FamilySearch features that are not yet ready for public release”.  Researchers are invited to participate in refinement of the programs, through testing and feedback.

Full-Text Search uses AI processes developed by FamilySearch to scan and locate information on digitized documents that have not been fully indexed. Their technique makes it possible to find specific words or phrases, including names of people that may not have been the main parties. All one needs to participate is an account on the site, which is free to obtain.

I wanted to try out the Full-Text Search to see how it would work. Beginning on the FamilySearch Labs page, I selected the experiment titled Expand your search with Full Text and clicked on “Go To Experiment.”

A search form came up asking for information on keywords, names, places, dates and collections to locate data about people and events.

On the form I entered just Nicholas Shepheard, which is the name of several of my ancestors, including four in my direct line, who lived in Devon, England for several centuries. As recommended, I put his name in quotation marks so that it would look for instances where both names were present and with the exact spelling.

I did not fill in any other data as I wanted the widest search possible. A list came up with 79 results with some documents having the name repeated several times within them. The documents were spread across many areas in the United Kingdom and Ireland (72) and the United States of America (7). In the UK and Ireland group, 66 were from England sources, four were from Ireland, and two were from Wales. The English sources included 11 counties or regions.

Then I narrowed down the list by choosing only those in Devon and got 37 results. Images of each original document found could be opened so I could see who the individual was and whether they were part of my family. A full transcription accompanied the images, both of which could be downloaded.

Some of the records I had seen before from searches of other collections and websites. Some were new to me. For convenience, Full-Text Search highlighted Nicholas’s name on the images and in the transcription.

One of the documents was a 1786 settlement examination from Ermington parish (reference FamilySearch: England, Devon, Plymouth, Parish Chest Records, 1556-1950). It shows that a man named Hercules Ferris worked for Mr. Nicholas Shepheard around 1761-62 at his farm called “Quay” in Cornwood parish.

AI transcriptions are not perfect. The settlement transcription had 14 errors plus six missing words out of a total 189 words in the actual transcription, a 10.6%-character error rate (CER). I determined that Quay was a misinterpretation for Gnats. This location later became Notts and was the Shepheard family seat for over 170 years – between 1630 and (probably) 1806.

This was the first time I had seen this document. I had not encountered it on any search of Cornwood or Ermington parish indexes or lists that included Nicholas Shepheard’s name. Important to me was the document appeared to confirm the family was living at Gnats/Notts in the mid-18^th century.

So, my experiment was a success!

Future projects will be to investigate those other examples with Nicholas Shepheard in UK and USA documents and to investigate other family members and locations.

Or I may look at natural events, one of my favorite subjects. For example, I did a quick search for "hailstorm” and got 6,536 results: 595 in the United Kingdom and Ireland and 5,711 in the United States of America. A search for “floods” got 149,004 hits: 10,107 in the UK and Ireland and 132,618 in the USA; “earthquakes” got 3,531 and 231,628, respectively; “famine” got 18,861 and 194,020, respectively. The results included mentions in newspapers which FamilySearch has in its library. Each search can be narrowed down to locales, years and names which will be handy for looking at specific families and past homes.

I highly recommend family historians take advantage of this new program and do some searches for their ancestors. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised.

Other AI Transcription Options

In reviewing AI transcription options, I also wanted to test and compare other techniques, so I uploaded the 1786 Ermington settlement example to other platforms. The results were eye-opening.

Transkribus

Transkribus has become one of the internationally recognized go-to programs for transcribing historical documents.

The development of software to transcribe old records began back in the late 1990s. Libraries were already using Optical Character Recognition to digitize printed books, but primarily for those written in English.  Another program was needed for material published in other languages.

Researchers came up with Analysed Layout and Text Object format which stored text and images of handwritten letters and words. The images were transcribed and stored for comparison to other documents over time building up a library of words and phrases. Such documentation became what is called Ground Truth, a growing repository of images that could serve machine learning, or artificial intelligence processing.

The Transkribus project was established and backed by several institutions, coming together as the READ-Coop, formed to test and further develop the programming. The group became the official guardians of the Transkribus platform. There are now more than 100 European members of the coop.

The process is simple to use. Just set up a free account, open the program, drag an image into the left-hand side of the window and the program will immediately begin. After a few minutes waiting in the queue, a transcription will be available. A line-by-line comparison with the original image can be produced.

I followed this formula with the 1786 Ermington settlement document.

Ancestry

Ancestry is developing a new process – still in Beta testing at present – called Document Transcription Tool. The function can read and transcribe a variety of old handwritten documents. This feature can be used globally across all Ancestry platforms, including the app, mobile, and desktop websites and in multiple languages.

To use the program, a user must have an Ancestry account and a family tree posted on their site. A target document is first loaded on to the Gallery section of an ancestor’s tree profile. Once opened, a button marked “Transcribe” is selected and the process will begin. The transcription takes only a few minutes.

For my test, I added the 1786 Ermington settlement document to the profile of my 5^th great-grandfather, Nicholas Shepheard. I then let Ancestry do its thing and come up with a transcription.

ChatGPT and Copilot

As part of my assessment, I also looked at having two other AI sites attempt a transcription: ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI; and Microsoft Copilot. These are two main-line platforms, developed by well-known groups, now commonly used in AI processing.

After uploading the 1786 Ermington settlement document to each of them, I asked, “Can you transcribe this image?”

Again, almost immediately I had transcriptions of the document.

Results

I compared Transkribus, Copilot, ChatGPT and Ancestry results with my own (actual) transcription. On the illustration here, my transcription, which I believe is accurate, is on the right. All the words in the four processes which matched the actual transcription are highlighted in yellow.

All AI techniques worked well. Character Error Rates (CER) were calculated for each from the number of words transcribed wrongly plus any word count difference in the result.

•      The best CER was in the ChatGPT transcription at just 7.9%, including missing seven words.

•      Copilot was right behind with a CER of 8.5%. This transcription was very close to the actual with only seven words mis-transcribed. It did miss nine words, though.

•      The Ancestry transcription ended up with fewer words than the actual transcription. It missed a whole phrase, along with the last word. Its 12.7% CER is acceptable but such large rates need close, line-by-line checking.

•      Most of the 16 errors in the Transkribus transcription were words where different letters were interpreted, such as often mistaking ‘e’ for ‘o’. Curiously it looked at a blemish on the document and transcribed it as a number. The CER of 11.1% is a bit misleading as it was very close to the original both in word count, format and spelling.

•      The FamilySearch Full-Text Search transcription had, as noted above, a CER of 10.6%, comparable to the other platform results (14 errors plus six fewer words).

Many errors can be a result of penmanship as much as historical writing styles.

Transcription of any of the processes can be improved by making corrections to the results offered and resubmitting them. Over time, as the archive of “ground truth” (more examples processed and corrections submitted) is built for similar documents, the transcriptions will get better.

Overall, the results of all the techniques were very encouraging. I certainly will be using each, or all of them going forward.

Online References

AI know how for family history: Have you tried the FamilySearch AI Full-Text Search. https://www.family-tree.co.uk/how-to-guides/ai-know-how-for-family-history-have-you-tried-the-familysearch-ai-full/

Ancestry News: Ancestry launches Document Transcription Feature https://www.ancestry.com/c/ancestry-blog/ancestry-news/document-transcription-feature

ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/

Copilot https://copilot.microsoft.com/

FamilySearch Full-Text Search https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/full-text

FamilySearch Labs https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/familysearch-labs

Mühlberger, Günter. (2023). A Short History of Transkribus. https://blog.transkribus.org/en/a-short-history-of-transkribus-with-gunter-Muhlberger

Transkribus https://blog.transkribus.org/en

BYU Library helpful recent videos

Using the FamilySearch Full Text Search Feature-A Genealogical Goldmine – James Tanner (2 June 2024) https://youtu.be/YRYn7wyo7OA?si=J7P10grh7p_pxhPA

AI, Handwriting Recognition, and Full Text Searches – James Tanner (2 February 2025) https://youtu.be/5PVUHrJLT4w?si=I5LLqSafJ3iJ6BPm

FamilySearch Full-Text Search: A New Key to Tearing Apart Brick Walls – Amy Peacock (4 February 2025) https://youtu.be/udU2xT0ssXA?si=Mnf06b4K793Nem-m

Getting to Know FamilySearch's New Full-Text Search – Kathryn Grant (19 February 2025) https://youtu.be/LhNE8znSPgM?si=_Fz1lT-UTfbPXQlj

The Needle in the Haystack: Researching Women and Minorities using FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search – Julia A. Anderson (26 February 2025) https://youtu.be/jPg0qTcsBVM?si=6Qxrxzypi2-UdBS4

The FamilySearch Full Text Function – Jerroleen Sorensen (10 May 2025) https://youtu.be/4M3h-bSiQGM?si=5p5z20qZ2u9dz87b

Legacy Family Tree Webinars

Full-Text Search: Genealogy Game Changer – Geoff Rasmussen (11 March 2024).  https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/full-text-search-genealogy-game-changer/

Secrets for Success: How to Harness the Power of FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search – Julia A. Anderson (21 May 2025) https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/secrets-for-success-how-to-harness-the-power-of-familysearchs-full-text-search/

Finding friends in many places…

I recently gave a talk to the Glasgow & West of Scotland Family History Society (GWSFHS) summarizing my research into the life of my wife’s great-grandmother, Elizabeth Cooper. It was titled Looking for Elizabeth. The work involved many twists and turns into assembling information about her and the Cooper family.

I have written here before about various aspects of the search for information concerning this family and what challenges we faced: Sometimes those family stories have a grain of truth (12 August 2014); Using Old Maps (several posts from 22 July 2014 to 26 August 2014); Alexander Coooper – Colour Sergeant, Cameronians, Scottish Rifles (14 November 2017).

As we delved into the Cooper family history, we came to realize that, of the many stories we had been told over the years about her and her son, Alexander, a few contained a little truth while others contained a great deal of misinformation. Sorting out the conflicting information was a major task.

Along the way, we had help from many different people in many regions. Their expertise and experience allowed us to construct a comprehensive story of Elizabeth’s life as well as the family in general. One of the important websites we found has a wonderful amount of information and compiled histories about Shetland families where the Coopers originated – at least in the modern era: Bayanne House/North Isles Family History. This site was set up by Tony G. to help people learn about their Shetland ancestors.

Andrew and Margaret Coupar family on North Isles Family History website

Another researcher, Anne B., was exceedingly helpful in directing us to records in Moray and Glasgow after I inquired about information sources on the Rootsweb Moray email list, since 2020 succeeded by the list at https://scotland-genealogy.groups.io/g/Moray. Finding Elizabeth and her son, Alexander, on the Scottish census, under her married name was an important contribution.

1881 Scotland Census – Govan – Elizabeth Coupar Blackburn and son Alexander

In late 2021 I joined the GWSFHS to make contacts with people I hoped could provide information on the area that I thought might help us in our continuing Cooper family research, especially for Elizabeth. I asked about cemeteries, specifically how I might find where Elizabeth had been buried, not having had luck with previous enquiries, and a very kind member, Leanne P., looked up the information and told me that Elizabeth was buried in Craigton Cemetery, in Govan district, on 11 April 1904. That was a major piece of information about the end point of Elizabeth’s life. I posted here about that event in Elizabeth Cooper Found (23 November 2021).

List of those interred in Craigton Cemetery, Govan plot with Elizabeth

It was not the end of helpful advice from the GWSFHS, though. Following my talk to the society, several members offered advice about other records available at the Glasgow City Archives. One person (Elizabeth) commented to Murray A., the society’s Minutes Secretary: Just listened to the latest talk and really enjoyed it. If you could contact Wayne to let him know there is a Poor Relief application for Elizabeth Couper/Blackburn, Born Shetland 1832. She applied in 1896 D/Hew 10/3/95.

Not long after, another member, Merinda H., actually visited the archives office and photographed the poor relief application for me.

Copy of Application for Relief from Elizabeth Couper Blackburn Ross in Glasgow 1895

This is an amazing document that was completely unknown to me and which I likely would never have found except for the kindness and knowledge of GWSFHS members. In it, we get more insight into what her life may have been like. Elizabeth related information about her parents’ names (accurate in this record in contrast to many other documents in which she was less than forthright), marriages, sibling’s name, residence, etc.

Over the years I have found advice and helpful service in libraries and record offices and local family history societies. My talks have given me not just a forum to present ideas and contribute to the general genealogical community but also resulted in meeting people – new friends – who could help me.

I highly recommend you look for assistance from people and groups in the areas where your ancestors lived for help in finding new records and sources of information. Join the local societies. Get to know the local libraries, archives and record offices. You might just discover many new friends who are able to help you with your family history research.

Thank you GWSFHS members!

More About Blended Families

In January 2015 I wrote about mixed or blended families and how common they are in almost everyone’s family tree – blog post Don’t Forget About Those Half-Brothers and Sisters. In June of that year I wrote again about the subject, this time about remarriages in several Devon parish I look after as an Online Parish Clerk – blog post Remarriages and Blended Families.

In an article to be published in the July 2025 issue Family Tree (UK) magazine, I discuss some of the ways in which blended families might happen and offer several examples.

In the piece I related some of the history of my father-in-law’s family in the article, headed by Alexander and Mary Ann (Milne) McKay. But one other close-to-home story did not make it into the piece, that for my mother-in-law, who was also a member of a blended family.

Jesse Walker Cooper was born on 7 December 1908, in Glasgow, Scotland, to parents Alexander and Elizabeth (Walker) Cooper. Elizabeth was Alexander’s second wife. Their marriage took place in Glasgow on 26 May 1908. Alexander’s unique story can be found in a blog post from 14 November 2017 - Alexander Cooper – Colour Sergeant, Cameronians, Scottish Rifles.

He had previously married Margaret Scott on 5 September 1890 in Hamilton, Scotland. They had two children, a daughter born 12 November 1892 and a son born 23 November 1895, both in Lossiemouth, Elgin, Scotland. The daughter died at sea, while the couple was sailing home from an army posting in India, on 10 February 1895. Margaret died of heart disease on 1 December 1907, in Glasgow.

Elizabeth had had a daughter, Violet Walker, out of wedlock, on 25 December 1905. She was given her mother’s maiden name. Following the marriage of Elizabeth to Alexander, the daughter went to stay with her maternal grandparents, living with them into adulthood. Violet never married so it is not possible to trace her paternal roots through the DNA of any descendants.

The 1911 Scotland census shows Alexander and Elizabeth living in Glasgow with his first son, Alexander Jr., daughter Jesse and another son, John. Alexander and Elizabeth had five more children together between 1910 and 1917.

Alexander Jr. enlisted with the Scottish Rifles in 1914. He was killed in action in France on 4 April 1916.

Alexander Sr. was illegitimate. No information is available that could identify his biological father. He was less than truthful on almost every major document he filed making it much more difficult to trace his origins.

DNA testing of his male descendants has been rejected by them. So, in this case as well, a whole family line is unidentified and likely to stay that way unless we can make significant headway in the analysis of autosomal DNA tests of female members of the family.

Jesse’s story highlights some of the difficulties in unravelling blended families without additional written records of DNA tests. We did not think to get a DNA test from her before her death which would have assisted in sourcing her paternal roots.

If you do not have a subscription to Family Tree (UK) I recommend doing so. You may also enjoy being part of Family Tree Plus, which will give you access to not only the magazine, but webinars and videos, instructional classes and other resources. www.family-tree.co.uk

Given the harsh living conditions of past centuries, even extending into the 20^th century, losing one parent to accidental death, natural disaster or epidemics was a frequent occurrence. With few church, community or governmental assistance programs, surviving spouses would have been quick to find new partners to share parenting.

Most family historians will find many blended families in their tree, often with children as part of them that do not share blood connections. That does not make them less related, however, in a truly familial sense.