FamilySearch Screen Shots
by
Byron Maddox maddoxfamilywebsitekc@gmail.com 2023
Creating
a Sign-In UserID and Password
If you
don’t already have a family USERID and password, you may create both. When you create your own account, you may add
living people, like your children and yourself.
Only with THIS USERID can you see those you create until they are marked
‘deceased.” If your living persons are
already created under a different USERID and PASSWORD, ask your family
genealogist for those and promise them not to make changes other than for your
own family or to add photos of those already in the tree. Anyone can made changes to deceased people,
which is why you should also fill out a “Family Group Sheet (included below) as
a backup to your research.
Printing
isn’t covered here but FamilySearch does provide some reports as do some
companies that can access genealogical records for a fee. Search “HELP’ to find how to print. There are also Five Minute Lessons on YouTube
which are free and can help you develop skills in data entry and research.
Already have your tree set up by someone else you know, willing to share it
with you ? Contact them, ask them
for the USER ID and PASSWORD; that will give you access to both living and
deceased persons they have created.
Otherwise set up your own; you can enter your children and parents, up
until you find a deceased ancestor that’s already in the system; then
Family Search will offer them to you.
If you
don’t have a free account yet, you can click on FamilySearch.org and at the
login, ‘create a new account.”
If you want to get your feet wet with a short video, try this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zDSNfZdlU&ab_channel=FamilySearch
Opening Screen
After Signing in, you'll see this first screen that sometimes shows a promotional add but also offers choices what you want to do next, including tips of what's new lately. It may change periodically, but the basics are the same.
Upper-right: Who is logged in and the important Settings, such as how you want to enter your dates (ddMMyyyy, MMddyyyy), and whether you want birth names first, or married names first. (That’s important for women whose names usually change when they marry.)
At the top: You’ll probably click first on your Family Tree to get started, or to Search for someone by NAME or FS ID (a 7 digit letter-number unique code).
FamilySearch will tell you if they have Record Hints
for some of the people in your tree.
FamilySearch will show you who the most Recent People
you viewed/changed so you can get back to them quickly.
At lower left: FamilySearch may show you a new feature ad or a picture of a newly added photo or document someone has added to a deceased person.
Click the Tree View
Many American families have been in this country since the 1600s-1700s arriving in Europe, mostly UK, and much of their ancestry is already in Family Search. All you have to do is sign In with an account, enter your parents and grandparents and if one's deceased, that entry you make will link you up for generations because of work already done by others. It could look like this:
Recent immigrants may not have so many records already in a family tree so the Tree wont' go back so far but once you've created a small tree, it might get bigger if you have enough family records to know where your great grandparents lived, their full names and a birth or death date and place to link up to older records.
The one below goes back only to great grandparents born in the mid 1800s. Hopefully oldsters in your family still alive can help you enter them as you begin. Know that LIVING people entered by other families of yours will be invisible until they're marked 'deceased'--all the tree companies protect living people.
#1 At the top, we see the FamilySearch TREE VIEW if you've clicked on it.
#2 On upper right, display the tree in LANDSCAPE or PORTRAIT or try a couple other tree display views.
Click an UP arrow
to see earlier ancestors, a DOWN arrow
to see child descendants. Slide your mouse or click a Left or right 
arrow to find a sibling.Family Tree PERSON VIEW "Details" Screen
If the page is too small to read, you can click the upper-right corner + plus sign to magnify the page.
--Genealogy Bank requires a fee for Newspaper announcements.
--Census data up to and including 1950 is free only on FamilySearch.
FamilySearch may ask you WHY you think your entry is right. In the “Reason” bucket, enter why you think your figure is right (say "birth/death certificate," or "personal knowledge", or "obituary", or "Find-A-Grave". (Ancestry's Find-A-Grave service gives you death/burial details (and if you pay their subscription, also a photo of their grave marker to insert into “Memories” tab.)
A formal photo works but also you can lift out your person from a group so long as the size of the head is a bit less than 1 inch and the background behind isn't too busy or distracting. If you need help resizing or creating a single cameo shot from a larger photo, ask someone with some expertise to show you, or email your photo to them to make it right. You need to learn how to use Windows Photo software to crop, and rename parts of photos for other tasks like this one. Name such new jpg files with theperson's name and call it "Cameo' when you save it.
Scroll down this Details/Person page to see families!
This Details/ Person View BOTTOM HALF shows your relative's SPOUSES and CHILDREN on the left side, and the PARENTS and SIBLINGS (brothers and sisters) on the right side. And several tabs across where you can add/or view things about your person.
On this screen at the top (it's actually halfway down the long DETAILS page, NOTICE the DROP-DOWN TABS.
“ABOUT” you can write a Life Story biography, or one is computer generated.
"DETAILS" display this page, this Persons page with name, gender birth and death dates and places.
"SOURCES" displays document proofs with actual birth, death, census, military records.
"COLLABORATE" is for notes between genealogists--best viewed before making changes.
"MEMORIES" is the fun one. Here, put or view photos--like wedding, family pictures, vacation shots, childhood pictures, military or work photos, even extra documents, and if you write well, write a nice biography of them or their accomplishments.
At the very bottom, you can rewrite the ABOUT "life story" text. If blank, it's a computer-created biography but you can overwrite it with things like their occupation, where they moved to, whatever is very notable about their lives.
Use the Memories Page to bring Ancestors to life!
Let’s look closer at the Memories dropdown in each ancestral profile. Most are empty until someone like you adds photos, documents, or writes biographical details. You are free to add memories to ANYONE if you have them.
The Memories screen is the place to add your best photos, a family snapshot or two, or write a biography if you want. We loaded this one up because Thomas is the IMMIGRANT, father of many US descendants.
We have some Census documents to show our relative lived with and their ages. We found a map of where they lived. And we wrote a story how Tom and Maggie immigrated to America and where they first lived.
Most memories won't have all that but it's a great place for wedding pictures, maybe even a vacation or family celebration. (You can click the screen photos here to make them bigger to study.)
Note: No one can EDIT or delete someone's Memory entry unless they are in poor taste but you can add or respond to other memory entries at the bottom of them.
This is the FamilySearch "Search" Screen. You can Enter First and Middle names, or nicknames in the First Names bucket, and in Last Names, either a married or maiden name. (Sometimes try different spellings or use wild card asterisks *.)
You can add places like states, towns, countries, click on Birth Marriage, Death categories to add year ranges or places. Experiment until you find some results.
FamilySearch will return the RESULTS (if any) on the left side of this screen.
IN this case, we used wild card * asterisks because we weren't sure of the spelling, which is a common problem for LT ancestors or friends.
You may not use it, but you CAN enter a name, birth or death dates and places to narrow down your search. You may need to try various alternate spelling if you're searching for an ancestor or cousin, or missing descendant. Or even old friends you want to reconnect with. Or to find their relatives or hometowns.
--Other Ways to Find people on the internet: Don't forget to 'Google" people you want to find or check school records, or even pay one of the "People Finding" companies a small fee to help you find their addresses or phone numbers anywhere in the country. Find Census records, so long as know Census records are only available up until the past 70 years. (So as of this writing, the last available Census released to the public is 1950.) You can even enter old addresses, or search for old neighborhood maps to get pictures of where you used to live, or old school yearbooks. If someone doesn't come up in an ancestral tree, where ELSE can you look to find them?
Comparing and Attaching Tip documents into Sources.
If you Click on a blue TIP icon and FamilySearch is showing you a document to check, you see THIS screen. (Note the tiny “View: Record” near the top. That may be the original photo of the document, like a page from a Census neighborhood!)
HOW TO UPLOAD: Right click a photo to save it to your Pictures -> Ancestors folder. Study who else lives in the household and their age and birth state or country. You may see nicknames, brothers and sisters, parents, even grandparents. Neighbors who married into your family. Census counts are taken every ten years since the 1700s and many exist (except for the 1890 Census which was destroyed in Washington DC by fire.)
Review it before Attaching it to your relative's record. What's on the left is what's been indexed from the document. On the right, is what's already in your family tree so you can COMPARE the two to make sure the new TIP document is a MATCH.
- · If it's NOT, "Detach" the document. or ADD a new relative or spouse if you know it needs to be added to your tree. Look CLOSELY!
- · Also look to see if at the top it tells you can click to see a full- screen copy of the ORIGINAL document.
- · You may want to ATTACH it, or COPY it to your computer to share, keep, or re-upload into your MEMORIES. Some historic documents are VERY, VERY Interesting and add details that would be lost forever if you don't save them!
Adding Records, and Check for Existing Records
Other than children who in all likelihood are NOT already in Family Search’s databases of millions of people, when you add a record, make sure you have enough information to search for existing records. First, middle, last/maiden names, date or year of birth, death, and state or city if you have it. Family Search will take that information and compare it very fast to all of its records of the same names, very close years and places of births and deaths, and if it finds very similar matches, it will present them to you to decide.
If you’re confident an existing FamilySearch Person IS the same (by checking years and parental names) use that existing record instead of creating a new, duplicate record. If it’s obviously NOT the same or parents and children don’t match, or years are way off, then Create a New Record instead.
What you DON’T want to do is to assign the wrong parents or children to a record. So again, when in doubt, create a new profile!
Warning Tip: Possible Duplicate.
Family Search does continually check to see if someone else has added a duplicate record to one of yours--especially as the software learns more information about your kin, like when you have added concrete dates, places of births or deaths, additions of parents or children.
If and when it finds possible duplicates, FamilySearch will provide TIP Warnings on the right side of such PERSON screens if it thinks it’s found one. If you see that, click on the warning and FamilySearch will present you with the possible duplicates to compare them. You decide and if you’re sure they are duplicates.
Study them carefully, and merge them IF you’re convinced so that the “surviving” record with the most details is chosen over one with limited or no information in it. Check for ages since fathers, sons and nephews often have the same names but only parents and siblings will differentiate them. Be sure to check the COLLABORATE notes if any and look for identical children and parents to verify your opinion. Only Then, MERGE the Duplicates.
Standard genealogy abbreviations
The genealogy community over many years subscribes to these common abbreviations on Geni, Ancestry and FamilySearch companies that create family trees:
- b means "born date" right before a date or year or place of birth
- d means 'death date" or "died" right before a date or year or place of death
- m means "marriage date" right before a date and place of marriage, or m to mean "married to" a person
- abt means "about" before a date to tell you the date or year is an estimate--not an exact date.
Ancestor names and date formats
- “nee” indicates a birth name, generally a female’s maiden name and this appears in many documents but may not be accepted by genealogy tree software. Example: “Michelle Obama nee Robinson” (Robinson is her maiden name).
You can change how FamilySearch displays married vs birth/maiden names as well as date formats in your account Settings in the upper right corner of the software under your account name.
Birth vs Married name display order. Most genealogy software lists women by maiden/birth name after their first names, because it’s permanent and married names are put in (parentheses) because they often aren’t. Example: Michelle Robinson (Obama.) Stepchildren are usually named after their natural father’s surnames and they appear as children under both natural parents, not stepparents.
Birth, Death, Marriage date formats. Dates are usually entered in most software Day-Month-Year (DD/MM/YYY) Example: 25 December 1945 but you can change it to your preference to (MM/DD/YYYY), December 25, 1945.
Why use FamilySearch over Ancestry or Geni?
FamilySearch.org is the oldest and largest genealogy system in the world, has many, many millions of records from all over the world. It's FREE, and a permanent gift to us all-- unlike the popular but pricy Ancestry.com, a for-profit company that charges subscribers $25 a month and Geni.com which costs a bit less for its Pro version but works better with the addition of its parent company’s subscription, MyHeritage.com. Geni has the additional burden of not being as thorough, or as easy to navigate as the other two. Geni’s main advantage is their volunteer genealogy system that specializes in foreign ancestry especially for some nations, such as Lithuania and Poland whose genealogists favor Geni. And they have one other rule that causes families some red tape. Geni offers anyone who creates profiles to have a managerial supervision over those records; families can ask to become ‘co-managers’ but it appears to be granted at the pleasure of the hobby genealogists who first entered them, becoming “managers;” some are a bit territorial about sharing the families they have adopted in Geni; none know your families so their research relies on documents and other people’s published family trees. Let’s say they fancy their own expertise over yours unless you’re very convincing!
Each tree enterprise shares and trades some genealogy information but their tree systems are very different--Ancestry lets people have their own trees but FamilySearch tries to eliminate duplicate records and Geni insists on it—which was not the case when parent company My Heritage just accepted the public’s uploading of Gedcom formatted ancestral files of sometimes thousands of records will little documentation of where the vital dates and places originated.
All three do access a lot of public records from county courthouses, state genealogical societies, military, and census records in the US and elsewhere.
PRIVACY. FamilySearch, Geni/My Heritage, and Ancestry protect living people from public view but allow us to have our own living family profiles which are private until they are marked ‘deceased.” Geni’s curators search public death information to mark the dead ‘deceased’ so they become public. The author of this document has not researched how FamilySearch and Ancestry learns that their living profiles should be marked deceased, and therefore public to all.
If you do not want your living relatives to be displayed on your tree, you have every right to delete yourself or your dependents, but we ask you limit yourself only to doing that to records of your immediate family if you choose. Another close family member allowed the posting by providing us with their names, birthdates and places-.
Some people are very sensitive to publicizing or showing photos of living minor children at all. The US Census Project does not release names and ages from its door-to-door surveys every ten years until 70 years has passed. (Currently, no Census is public after the 1950 Census, recently released; military service and all state marriage, birth and death records are public however but release of medical records for living people is forbidden by law without their permission.)
Many hundreds of Mormon volunteers digitize public and private records in churches around the country as a mission of their church to help families know their ancestors. They do not recruit for their church. This is a service project BY the church.
* In lists, we INDENT SPOUSE right under our relative with 'm-", First, Middle Last/MAIDEN NAME Birthdate. IF there are children, we then INDENT and NUMBER each child under them--in birth order if we know it, 1, 2,3,4,5, And each child's full names (first, middle, last and b (Date of birth.) Enter "UNKN" if we don't know it or will have to find out.
In genealogy, Maiden Names are more important for women than Married Names. Even though Obituaries and Census Records show women's MARRIED NAMES once they’re married and recounted but Birth names (Maiden names) never change and that is the advantage to always showing Maiden names primarily and always. Maiden names are the only ones that link to women's ancestors and besides, re-marrying is common, so they are not helpful.
Children must ALWAYS be listed under their NATURAL parents, not stepparents or adopted parents. If you enter a new child and that child's parents aren't BOTH listed as spouses, you must create the missing parent and add the child under both, no matter who raised them.
* Nicknames, married names (Like Rick or "Willie") or foreign surname spellings are placed under "Alternative Names." Very important because FamilySearch uses those nicknames too, to search official documents to tell you about. Some people never use their birth names, so nicknames in this space really help find your relatives documents. Some software has special buckets to store the original foreign spelling of names which can be helpful when tracing ancestry back to foreign, non-English nations.
* FINDING/SEARCHING People You can Search or FIND people either by name, date of birth, spouse name place, OR by ID...so keep these Tree ID's handy! Have fun, ask for help from another descendant!
* Find or add photos, files, birth document files under any page's "Memories" dropdown. You can usually right click them to download ones to your own computer!) (Once you upload a photo, it goes into your Gallery of photos and to upload it to another person, do it from our tree's Gallery--not again from your 'PC Device.')
Speed Searching using Browser BOOKMARKS/FAVORITES
Once you have created or found a particular ancestor in FamilySearch.ORG you want to re-visit frequently, a FAST FIND way that Person’s record next time is to create a Browser Favorite/Bookmark pointing to it. (Use your browser's favorites to remember their URL links and send you to them when you click on them.
Then when you are in the FamilySearch record you want to save, press the little STAR at the top in your address line and save it as a favorite. You’ll probably want to create a Favorite Category called “FamilySearch” or “Ancestry” and save many addresses there.
Here’s one you can try IF you have already saved your USERID and PASSWORD in your browser:
(It’s President Kennedy’s Person ID in Family Search.)
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/L89N-K6Q
Using a Browser Favorite on FamilyTree. First, you must have already created a FamilySearch USERID and PASSWORD in FamilySearch and saved them in your Edge or Chrome's browser Passwords folder. Your browser will remember it next time you enter a link to a tree relative with a FamilySearch.org address and should log you in. If it didn't, then log in with your userID and password.
Printable Family Group Worksheet
This is a photo of a blank worksheet you can SAVE in your Pictures->Ancestry folder to later print out or email to a relative and ask them to fill it out. Right click on it, and save it now, with the filename "Family Group Worksheet".
- · It's also a good record to keeping your family records.
- · Print some out for when your relatives come over to get those full names and birth dates, maiden or middle names of ALL the children and their spouses.
- · Once filled out, scan it or take a smartphone closeup picture and email that picture to whomever in the family fills out the Family Tree. Or put it in your directory of important computer documents. You may want to print out a few for when your kin come over and they can fill out those birthdates and maiden or middle names.
- · If you want, you can take a picture of it filled out and email it to whoever is the designated family relative that keeps the FamilySearch tree up to date by adding spouses and their ancestry, or children as they are born.
The study of ancestry has always been popular as people wanted to learn more about their ancestors who lived before them. Some cultures have maintained thorough records of families and ways of life through art, literature, and religious records. Today, there are three major companies, one a religious organization, that has created computerized records of families all over the world.
A FREE Non-profit genealogy family tree worldwide project of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons of Salt Lake City, Utah. For over a century, the Mormons have support ancestral research for their own church members and offer it to the public as a worldwide service project. They do not charge the public to build and work with others to create ancestral family trees. FamilySearch ScreenPrints and Manual (this page)
A subscription-based Family Tree company that has existed for about 30 years which charges users about $25 a month to build their own family trees and share information with millions of others in the US and other nations to record ancestry. Ancestry also provides DNA ancestry tracing kits and worldwide links to trace your ancestors.
Geni.com A fee based system similar to ancestry that does allow free accounts but this private family tree online service withholds research except for the "Pro" subscription of about $20 a month. Geni is a favorite for certain immigrant communities like Lithuanians to store and exchange research in their own foreign languages back to European roots. It's owned by another Pay site, My Heritage which requires yet another subscription.
Stephen Morse's "One Step"
This brilliant search engine has you entering your ancestors and it can search ship arrivals from Europe, Census records in the US and much more. It's a tool many genealogists use to research people's family ancestors and it borrows data from all the major family tree companies.
Photo: 1925 European immigrants at the docks of Ellis Island's Immigration receiving station looking across to New York's Manhattan.
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