Friday, October 1, 2010

Try FamilySearch "record Search Pilot"

There is great news on the horizon, even though there is still room for improvement (like making the images for the Belgian records available!!!)

If you have family from Luxemburg (the Grand Duchy), you will be delighted to learn that the Civil Registers have been uploaded online and you can 'scroll' , more like page through, the records as if you were sitting at a microfilm reader in a Family history Center or in another library.
Yes, and it's not just for Luxemburg. There are other countries available too.
We who have BELGIAN only lines, will have to be content (for now) to have access to the index and continue to hope the Archives will let up and realize this would open their archives to the world not make them lose patrons... quite the opposite I think..
Anyway... here is what you do...

Go to www.familysearch.org

Under the heading "Search Records", choose "Record Search Pilot"
You will be redirected to a page where all the product of FamilySearch Indexing is uploaded.
There is quite a bit of information on Belgium already and hopefully images sometime in the future... )=
Click on "Search or Browse our record collections"
You will see a map come up. Click on Europe or choose from the pull down menu "All regions (48)"

Three choices for Belgium: Births, deaths, marriages - indexes, no images ... yet...

This should be exciting to those who have ancestors who lived on the Luxemburg border as there was often a lot of movement between countries... You might find family members already...
Have fun!

PS: Allow me another pitch from on top of my soap box to invite you to index with FS Indexing... It will never cost you a penny to access the records online, and that's really how it should be.

http://thebelgianresearchers.blogspot.com/