The Most Comprehensive Search-Engine for England Ancestors: 

FamilySearch.org/search 

Which database would you search, first:  i.e. names from Lancashire church records of a) a database-pool of 21 million names, or, from b) an older Lancashire church records database pool of merely 3.8 million names? The choice seems quite obvious! 

Yet I'd wager to say (though I'm not a betting person) that you didn't know that when you search for ancestors in strictly FamilySearch’s “Historical Records” page (HRP—see https://bit.ly/2RnsumQ), that your search is automatically limited (with hardly any exception) with fractional lower numbers of names in the old databases found there in that portion the website! So, user [of the FamilySearch Historical Records page] beware! 

While it’s true most of these old published stand-alone databases (in HRP) come with images attached (a wonderful feature), those databases, however, are not often updated with fresh, newly indexed name entries!

As FamilySearch indexes close to a million names a day), what happens to fresh name entries from newly indexed records, and where can you access and search them? The answer and the purpose of this brief article is to reveal that just about all newly indexed names are automatically funneled or processed--in almost real-time--to their databases found in FamilySearch’s main search engine (SEP—>see https://bit.ly/2zgLdsi). So always choose wisely when using FamilySearch.org to search for ancestors:  Choose ALWAYS to first use the main search engine page (SEP--see above screen-shot), when searching for ancestors online! To do this, follow these simple steps when you visit FamilySearch.org's main search (engine) page (SEP—https://bit.ly/2zgLdsi): 

1) type the ancestor’s data 

2) then type in name of an i.e. England county in the “Location” field

3) click “Search”!

Because you are using the main search engine, you are now searching the best, most comprehensive and updated county-wide datasets provided by FamilySearch! And FamilySearch has been indexing Church of England and Nonconformist church registers since at least 1969 and has the most published data online (Greater Middlesex [partially] and Oxfordshire [mostly] excluded).

Here’s the county by county current comparison of England county dataset total numbers in both SEP and HRP. When you see the totals, you will realize you are drastically limiting the numbers of names against which you are searching when using the (HRP) database sets in the Historical Records page vs the when you use the main Search Engine page (SEP):

County Name	Search Engine Page (SEP) searches--	Historical Records Page (HRP) searches--
Bedfordshire	1.5 million – 90%	NA
Berkshire	1.2 million – 70%	NA
Buckinghamshire	1.2 million – 65%	NA
Cambridgeshire	1.9 million	182,000 – only 10%
Cheshire	8.5 million	6.6 million
Cornwall	3.1 million	840,000 – 29%
Cumberland	1.5 million – 80%	NA
Derbyshire	6.3 million	2.7 million
Devonshire	4.4 million	2.4 million – 55%
Dorsetshire	3.3 million	1.5 million
Co. Durham	3.3 million	100,000 (marrs only) 03%
Essex	3.4 million	1.4 million – 50%
Gloucestershire	4.3 million – 60%	NA
Hampshire	4.6 million	1.4 million – 33%
Herefordshire	2.5 million – 80%	NA
Hertfordshire	1.8 million – 95%	NA
Huntingdonshire	1.4 million – 65%	NA
Kent	9.8 million	1.9 million – 20%
Lancashire	21 million	1.8 million - 09%
Leicestershire	2.5 million	2.5 million – 100%
Lincolnshire	6.5 million	1.3 million – 28%
London	1 million – 90%	NA
Middlesex	5.5 million – 28%	1.2 million (Westminster only)
Norfolk	5.1 million	1.4 million -
Northamptonshire	100,000	71,000 – 71%
Northumberland	2.9 million	854,000 – 32%
Nottinghamshire	1.8 million	NA
Oxfordshire	360,000	NA
Rutland	600,000	326,000 – 52%
Shropshire	2 million	NA
Somersetshire	2 million	NA
Staffordshire	9.6 million	4.8 million – 50%
Suffolk	10 million	NA
Surrey	5.7 million	2.1 million – 40%
Sussex	5.8 million	2 million – 35%
Warwickshire	6.2 million	2.8 million – 44%
Westmorland	1.2 million	NA
Wiltshire	3 million	NA
Worcestershire	2.5 million	NA
Yorkshire	12.6 million	NA
ENGLAND TOTAL:	174 million (SEP)	41.7 million – 24% vs SEP

Successful searches are made dramatically more possible in FamilySearch.org’s by using the main search engine (SEP)! Contrastingly, the stand-alone databases in the Historical Records (browse) page (or HRP) are only fractionally as helpful!  Always(!) use our main search engine, first! Then try the databases found in our Historical Records page--with their respective images.

Happier hunting to all!