Another use case for searching Family Tree (please 🙏)
Here is another use case for seaching Family Tree:
One: I am traveling to Munich, Germany. I want to search for 1) direct ancestors, 2) who died in Munich, 3) before 1900. I don't see how this is possible.
Two: I am on a road trip through Arkansas. I want to search for 1) direct ancestors, 2) who died in the state of Arkansas. I don't see how this is possible.
It would be really nice if the search results showed a list of people, sorted by the closeness of the relationship, with a little "show my relationship" next to each person.
Yes, I know that FamilySearch has a search function. But it brings up every person in the database not related to me.
Yes, I know that defining "my family tree" is a challenge. Let's say I want to define it as direct ancestors.
Yes, I know that the fan chart shows colors by birth country. But this is not good enough if I want to search city or county, or search for other events like death or marriage.
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Two functions will sort of do close to you are looking for. One is "Where Am I From?" under the activities tab at https://www.familysearch.org/discovery/explore/generations Play around with all the options there. Under any of the tabs you can zoom in on the map to seen ancestor events in a limited area.
The other is "Map My Ancestors" on the mobile app. This blog article is a bit old but the feature works about the same way: https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/whats-new-map-your-ancestors
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Hmmm - yes, being able to perform searches and other functions ON YOUR ANCESTRAL TREE as opposed to the entire database WOULD be excellent for users and WOULD further the FamilySearch goal of uniting families across generations. How about it, FamilySearch?
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As has been explained every time this feature is requested, the computer processing power/time required to search the entire tree, just to find what you want, would be astronomical. It would slow the entire system to a halt.
The tree had over 1 billion profiles the last I read. It is growing every day. It's a single collaborative tree.
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Such a function has been requested probably over a couple of hundred times now. I can recall discussions of this shortly after Family Tree opened in 2012. So I am sure that the programmers of Family Tree are clearly aware that this is a feature people would love.
It took them about seven years to develop the View My Relationship feature in a way that it would not totally crash the system.
It took them eleven years to figure out how to add the ability to tag sources to Other Information.
They have been working on a system for having shared living IDs in Family Tree for at least the past five years and it might get released later this year.
Historically FamilySearch has always been teetering just over the cutting edge of technology. I wish I had a link to an article I read once about Elder Packard's first meeting with IBM back in the 1960s or 1970s about computerizing the Church's genealogy information. As a bad paraphrase, the article talked about how the company was rather condescending as they talked in grandiose terms about their systems until they gave Elder Packer a chance to explain what the Church wanted to do. Then they got really quiet.
Basically this type of feature on a database the size of Family Tree is really complex. I do hope we get it some day but we'll just have to be patient. The beginnings of such in a simple way are in place. If you are familiar with Ordinances Ready, it kind of does this type of search. It follows back direct lines ten generations then forward five generations until it finds four names that match one criteria then stops. This very limited search takes about eight seconds. It could take hours to complete a search back then forward unlimited generations using multiple criteria and needing to find all matches.
Here is an interesting article about the challenges FamilySearch deals with: https://diginomica.com/familysearch-branches-work-help-users-trace-family-trees This was from six years ago and apparently they have far outgrown the solution talked about in that article.
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