So, in the last lecture, you saw how some of the entries on the baptism search came up as being from the International genealogical index, or the IDI for short, which is how we usually refer to it. So, I hear you ask, what exactly is the IDI? And how do I use it? Well, in this lecture, I'm going to explain just that. The AGI is a very useful resource that was actually started by the Mormons otherwise known as the church at the latter day saints. In this religion, there is a belief that it is of benefit to posthumously baptize your ancestors.

So of course, they have a particular interest in genealogy, and they established the Genealogical Society of Utah. The United States. This society started compiling the AGI in 1973 to make it easier for their members to find their ancestors and carry out these baptisms. And luckily for the rest of us family historians made it available to family history societies and archives around the world. It is also updated every few years. It includes mainly baptisms, and also some marriages, but burials are very rare.

Now, when I first started doing genealogy, which was before the internet came along, the IDI was only available on microfiche with a separate set of features for each county. Furthermore, only the relevant county along with possibly the surrounding counties were available for each county archives. The index was listed alphabetically. by name as you can see from this image, and you can see too that the information is fairly limited. Nowadays, as you have seen the IDI is fully indexed online so we can now view all of the IDI entries across the country. Great, fantastic.

But wait, it's not quite that simple. Nothing ever is is it? I'm going to show you some of the advantages of big AI and then some of the drawbacks that not everyone realizes about extremely important to know if you do not want to make mistakes and go racing up the wrong tree. So what are the advantages of the IDI? Well, the IDI can be extremely useful in cases where the original parish registers have not yet been published online. There are still only a few counties that have very good online coverage of published original registers.

So the IDI can help you to find baptisms and some marriages that would not otherwise show up in your search results. Now, in the past, the idea was very useful for finding ancestors who were born outside the parish or county they later lived in or in a city where there are many different parishes, as it was indexed for a whole county rather than for each parish. However, this advantage was much greater when you're confined to the county record office as I once was not so much of an advantage when you are searching mainly online where you can search over a wide area. Now the IDI can sometimes be useful when you find that an ancestor came from a different country, as long as that country is well covered by the IDI such as the United States of America. So, what about the disadvantages? Well, the RTI is not complete.

Some counties are not well covered. And there are many gaps. It is extremely important that you realize this, and not everybody does. So if your ancestor does not show up on an AGI search, it does not mean they were not there. Now, you've heard me say this before, and I'm sure you'll hear me say it again. Because the information has been copied.

There are many errors. You saw that in the date of my great grandfather's baptism. And often the entries keep the basic information only as you just saw in the microfiche image I showed you earlier and they can miss out extra possibly useful. information that might be in the original parish register. So here's my advice on how to search the AGI. Firstly, if you can only find one entry for a possible answers to those within the area of searching but perhaps outside the pair of shoe expected to not assume that this is the only person with that name and therefore must be the person you're looking for.

It is possible that the Parrish way your ancestor was born has not been covered by the AGI. So always check your findings against other resources and try to eliminate ambiguous entries by perhaps finding a burial. Now remember that the IDI is a finding aid it is not a source in itself. When you find an entry in the IDI that you are interested in, you should Always check the original registers. Now if the original register is not online, then most record officers will send you a copy of the original for a small fee. The original registers may give you extra information such as the occupation of the father or date of birth.

Remember that in most genealogical search sites, the IDI entries are now come up amongst all the other entries, it is really important that you recognize the difference between an idi entry and an original record as the two are not the same. Now if you wish to search the AGI alone, for example, if you cannot find the original parish register entry, then I recommend using familysearch.org and I'm going to show you a quick search on this in my next lecture. So in my last ScreenFlow lecture, where you watched me search for the baptism of my great grandfather, you saw how it came up on ancestry as well as the IDI entry and the original register. Now there are times when it can be useful to search the IDI only. So in my next lecture, I'll show you how you can carry out a search on the church at the latter day saints own site familysearch.org