Search



Search the FamilySearch database.

FamilySearch ⟶ Search


Search Image
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Search is used when you have a limited amount of data. You are casting a wider net and will return data that is not relevant.It looks at all of the search fields, especially when you are not considering "exact match".
Match is used when you believe that the Person in your records may already be in the system and want to match to an exact FamilySearch person.This requires more data than the Search. It is used for detecting for duplicate persons and for retrieving historical record hints.

For Search:

Values that contain white space must be surrounded by double quotes (i.e. q.givenName="Sally Mae").
Name values may include the '*' and '?' wildcard characters.
Please review the General Guidelines section in
https://www.familysearch.org/developers/docs/api/tree/Tree_Person_Search_resource
for more details

Match requires more information

Matches require the given name, surname, gender and one of the following (or no data will be returned):
 •    Birth date, place.
 •    Death date, place.
 •    Spouse given name, surname.
 •    Father given name, surname.
 •    Mother given name, surname

From the search results, for the following are available

	Download the person from FamilySearch
	Download tree of information from FamilySearch
Import to GEDCOM	Imports the family to local GEDCOM database
Import Family	Imports the family to the local GEDCOM database

See Importing to GEDCOM

Download Tree allows for folks to be downloaded

Download a tree of information from FamilySearch
  Downloading can take a while for if the number of generations >2