Find people in my tree
It would be really helpful to be able to find a person in my tree based on their name. I was sure the feature was there, but I just couldn't find it. But no one in my local family history center knows how. When you are researching a person not in your direct line, it's hard to find them in pedigree view if they are a child of a relative. Thank you!
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I'm too lazy to go find the many, many, many previous iterations of this idea.
The problem: how should the system figure out who is in "your" tree and who isn't? Should it run a full download of your ancestors up to whatever number of generations plus all of their descendants, before each search? When doing that with one of the FS-compatible offline genealogy programs, it can take hours. Or should it do the search and then run the "show my relationship" routine on each result? That could make each results page take several minutes to load.
If you just want to search among your ancestors, use the fan chart and ctrl-F (or your OS's equivalent). If you've made edits to the profile in question, you can find it in "My Contributions". And you can star ("follow") profiles of interest.
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Being able to search while limiting to direct ancestors/descendants from a starting person would be useful. Not holding my breath for such a feature, of course.
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@RTorchia, you can search through a person's direct ancestors using the fan chart, and you can search through a person's direct descendants using the descendancy chart.
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There is a feature in ancestry that I wish we had here. I like being able to search names within my own tree. There is a search feature with a drop down menu and you can type in a first name and all individuals with that first name (with their other names as well) show up. It is the fastest way to move around to a person without having to type all of their information, climb up and all over with in my tree or know their id number. Can I do this on family search and I just don't know how?
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This is probably one of the most-often-requested features in this forum, but it misunderstands the basic structure of the communal tree.
The problem: how do you propose FS should determine who is in "your" tree and who isn't?
Should the algorithm try to impose this limit before each search, by doing a full tree download of all of your ancestors going however many generations up, and all of those ancestor's descendants? In the genealogy programs that can synchronize with FS, such a download can take many hours.
Or should the search try to filter the results by running the "view my relationship" process on each match? This could cause each page of the results to take several minutes to load.
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If you have made edits to the profile in question, you can find it on your "My Contributions" page. If it's a direct ancestor, you can use your fan chart and your OS's text-finding function (such as ctrl-F) to find the name. If you've looked at the profile recently, it'll be on your Recents list. And finally, if you expect to want to revisit a profile, you can click the star to add it to your "Following" list.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi True, but only four generations in each direction at a time, and the UI isn't great. What I'm talking about would be something more like having an option in the standard Search Family Tree dialog that would limit the results to direct relationships of a certain person.
For example: "Find people named Geraldi born in Sciacca Italy, died in United States, descended from Antonino Sclafani LRP3-81R."
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The fan chart goes up to seven generations, and you can manually expand the descendancy to however many generations have been entered.
Granted, neither one allows searching by anything besides the primary name.
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Some additional techniques:
- I use the Puzzilla partner website for this. The paid subscription, costing around $40 per year, includes the ability to search any tree in FamilySearch Family Tree, any ancestry or descendancy, for a name.
- A free alternative is the RootsMagic basic version. Install RootsMagic on your own computer, import any tree (again, any ancestry or descendancy) from FamilySearch Family Tree, then search it for a name.
Perhaps we have offered enough techniques that someone could write a Help Center article to answer this very frequent question.
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I would like to be able to search only people in my family tree by surnames to locate them quickly. Some are many generations back and I need to locate them quickly to check details or make edits.
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