Almost two years ago when I started doing Danish Family History, the only Danish records on Family Search were from an incomplete database of indexed baptism records (no image). With the help of the Research Wiki page about Denmark Genealogy I taught myself how to find records using a combination of looking at indexed census records on Danish Family Search and browsing through church records on Arkivalieronline.
At some point My Heritage acquired and indexed a huge number of Danish church books and census records, which has been really helpful at times. And now it looks like Family Search has gotten access to their databases and these records are available on FamilySearch.org. Over the past several months I've started noticing record hints about census records coming up. Then within the past couple of weeks the database "Denmark Church Records, 1484-1941" was apparently uploaded because my tree has exploded with record hints from this collection.
I've had mixed feelings about this. Part of me wonders why I felt so led to start doing Danish family history the hard way when I could have probably found these people in a much shorter amount of time if I had waited until now. I guess the benefit is that I learned some very valuable research techniques in the process that will continue to help me even with the indexed collections on Family Search. Not all of the records are indexed correctly, which means they won't all show up as record hints (or if they do, I've found that often the places are wrong), but I can still look them up on Arkivalieronline or Danish Family Search since I know how. I've also gained a fair amount of skill in reading gothic script and deciphering the records, which I probably wouldn't have picked up as well if I had been able to find these records through the record hints.
The explosion of record hints also means that I have a huge amount of work to do right now going through all the people I've researched and adding the record hints. The reason I need to work on this is because other well-meaning Family Search users often crawl through their trees adding all the record hints without giving a thought to whether they are correct or not. Then when I get my weekly changes email from Family Search I find out about bad merges and extra spouses and children from the other side of the country added to families, so I get to clean up the mess. I figure if I add the record hints myself I can prevent some of those headaches in the future. But it's a big project right now.
But once I get all of that sorted out, I can already tell that I'm going to be able to do research much faster than I ever have before. With record hints and searches on Family Search it will be incredibly easy to find records about people and in many cases quickly add entire families to the tree. God really is hastening the work of redeeming the dead. Ultimately I see this as an incredible blessing.
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