How Search & Family Lines Work
A plain-language guide to searching this archive and understanding Family Lines.
What is a Family Line?
A Family Line is one of a small number of surnames your family has chosen to feature as its own page — for example, Cothran or Harrison. Each person whose recorded surname exactly matches a Family Line's name is automatically counted as a member of it. A Family Line also has a Root Ancestor (the person its family tree diagram starts from) and a Sort Order (which just controls the order the Family Lines are listed in — it has no effect on membership).
Family Line vs. Search — why the counts can differ
A Family Line counts people by their exact surname. The main Search the Archive page searches more broadly — given names, middle names and surname all at once — so it can also find someone whose Family Line surname only appears as a middle name. For example, a person named "David Harrison Cothran" has the surname Cothran, with Harrison as a middle name. He is correctly left out of the Harrison Family Line (his surname isn't Harrison) but correctly appears if you search the name "Harrison". Both results are correct — they're just answering different questions: "who is a Harrison by surname?" versus "who has the name Harrison anywhere in their name?"
Searching for a married woman by her husband's surname
Genealogy records normally store one primary surname per person — for a woman, that's conventionally her birth (maiden) surname. This archive does not overwrite that with a married name. Instead, the Surname search (and the surname index) will also find a person by a surname she gained through marriage, computed from the actual marriage record on file. A result found this way is labeled married name so you can tell it apart from her own recorded birth surname.
Name search
The Name field on the search page looks for every word you type somewhere across a person's given names, middle names and surname — in any order. Searching "Helen Leas" finds anyone named Helen with Leas anywhere in their name, even if her given name is recorded as "Helen Arinda" and her surname as "Leas" separately.
Place search
Typing a full state name (e.g. "Virginia") or its two-letter abbreviation (e.g. "VA") searches for that U.S. state specifically — it will not match unrelated places that merely contain the same two letters (for example, searching "MA" finds Massachusetts, not "Manila"). Typing a city or county name still searches as a normal partial match.
Privacy
People marked as possibly living are protected — the public site shows only their name, never dates, places or family detail, until an administrator confirms it's appropriate to publish. Signed-in administrators can see full detail on any record for research and quality-review purposes; this never changes what the public sees.