The FamilySearch website has several different aspects to it such as the Family Tree, records, images, books, the research wiki, and more. Ninety-nine percent of the time, my first stop is the catalog.

When I am planning my research, or wondering what records might be available for a given location, I always start with the catalog. It’s just the way I work. You might prefer to start with the Wiki or the records or images. This is just how I learned it back when I was a “baby genealogist” and it makes sense to me. You find the catalog under the Search tab. I nearly always put in a location to get started.

I start by typing in the county, and the catalog brings up the places that match that name. Lucky for us, there’s apparently only one county in the United States named Audrain. Once you click on that location, you are then taken to the page that has all of the topics available for that location.

You’ll notice, on the left are various filters you can use to narrow down your results. However, in the main section on the right, you can see all of the topics (see red box on the right in the screenshot above). You can see the topics such as biography, census, church records, land and property, probate, vital records, and so on. Clicking on vital records gives you the following options:

If those records have been incorporated into a larger database, you might see a link to that database on the page:

This one tells us that the Audrain marriages are included in a larger database. Usually I will click on that link and see if the record I’m seeking can be found quickly. However, they don’t always show up and I’ll go “old school” and click through the digital microfilm. This sometimes happens because of handwriting/indexing issues, or because this particular film hasn’t been indexed, or probably a number of other reasons I am unaware of.

A search through the database does indeed bring up the record I am seeking.

Martha Mitchell, daughter of Thomas Mitchell, married William Long in Audrain County in 1878. The index entry shows a camera icon which, when clicked, takes you directly to the image.

Sometimes, you will not be taken to the image because they haven’t gotten everything connected. But you will usually be given enough information in the index to find the record on the appropriate digitized microfilm.

If you click on the camera icon, you will be taken to the digitized microfilm that you can “scroll” through just as if you were looking at the microfilm.

Those are the basics of using the FamilySearch Catalog. There is a lot more to the FamilySearch site, and we may come back to that in a future series. We will stick with catalogs for now. Next time we will look at a few others and see how they are very similar in function.