Example of Viewing a Church Record on Family Search

If You Know the Film Number

 

If you somehow know the FamilySearch film number, say 2267599, you can see if you can view it from home, from a Family History Center, or only at Salt Lake City as follows:

  1. Log into familysearch.org, creating a new free login if needed.
  2. From the menu at the top, click on Search => Catalog
  3. On the FamilySearch Catalog page, click on Film/Fiche Number
  4. Type in the desired film number, in our case 2267599.
  5. Click on Search
  6. You will now get a list of results and some idea of what each result contains.
  7. If I was interested in Roman Catholic Metrical books for the village of Ostrow, I would click on the 4th result, starting with Item 6.
  8. That gives a long page that talks about the record, the language (usually German, Latin, or Polish for GGD members) and the Locality Subjects (villages) with their names in the languages they were know by.
  9. Further down is a list of Films/Digital Notes, the type of record (birth, marriage, death), the film number, the Digital Folder Number (DGS) and an icon telling you whether you can view the record or search it.
  10. Many of the records on this page have the camera with key icon camera with key icon which means that you can view the image at a Family History Centre near you.
  11. We are interested in film 2267599, so we would do a search on this page for that number, either visually or by pressing the appropriate keys for your system (e.g. Ctrl-F for Windows)..
  12. This film is near the bottom and has 4 sets of notes associated with it, each listing the type of record and he years covered.
  13. Let us look at the first one, 2267599 Item 6, by clicking on the camera icon.
  14. That brings up a page full of icons of some of the 897 scanned microfilm images associated with this item.  There is also a Ukrainian credit window that can be made smaller by clicking on "See Less")
  15. There are navigation buttons to the left of the word Image and another to the right of 897.  This will take you to the previous or next image.
  16. For fun, type 15 into the box which currently says "1".  You can see the outline box now showing around an image in the second row.
  17. Double-click on that image to see it enlarged.  Click on the + sign at the left to see it even larger. Use the scroll wheel to change magnification and the left mouse button to move the image around.
  18. You can see it is the marriage for births from 1933, in Latin, with the child's name (Catharina), her parents, and the witnesses.  This will vary among villages and church denominations.
  19. For some villages, you can click on the download button near the top right.  This village unfortunately cannot be downloaded due to contract restrictions with the Archives of Ukraine.
  20. To "take a picture" for this record, you would need to use the screen capture ability of your computer.  On a PC, you would press the Print Screen or Prnt Scrn button near the top right of your keyboard to copy the screen image to your clipboard and then you could paste it into your favourite graphics program or into Word.
  21. If you do not know the film number, you can search for the village under Search => Catalog => Place, choosing the one in Galicia or Austria.  Try "Neusandez" which has viewable Evangelical church records. You may need to try various spellings of the village name in various languages to get the right one.