Are you frustrated trying to find a will or probate documents for your Georgia ancestors at Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org? A document you know must exist, but it’s not there? Have you found records for some ancestors but not others? You may (or may not) know that both Ancestry and FamilySearch have many scanned records online that are not indexed. You may not realize, however, that they have many records that are indexed incorrectly, and record sets that are mislabeled.
For example, I recently went through over 2500 pages of Liberty County wills and probate records on both Ancestry and FamilySearch. Both record sets are identical on each site, but Ancestry has indexes for many of the records that FamilySearch has not indexed. However, in paging through the records, I found many cases where the Ancestry indexer had missed a document change and had indexed the next document under the name for the previous document. If your ancestor was the next name, and you thought that record set was indexed, would you think to search it page by page?
Not only that, but, for example, the record set labelled “Wills, Miller, Melissa-Zoucks, D, 1869-1917” does contain wills for surnames from Miller to Zoucks. It also contains all kinds of related probate documents and the time period covered is actually 1849 to 1966. I found the same problem in other record sets.
Here’s how to find Georgia county wills and probate documents at each site:
At Ancestry.com, click here and select your county from the drop-down menu on the right under “Browse this Collection.” Or go to the Ancestry.com home page, and under Search, select “Card Catalog,” then search for “Georgia, Wills and Probate Records, 1742-1992.” Click on it and select your county from the drop-down menu.
At FamilySearch.org, click here and then click on your county. (If you do not have a FamilySearch.org account, you’ll need to create one. It’s free.)
At both sites, you will be taken to a list of the record sets available for that county. Click on the record set you want and start to page through it. Good luck on your search!
