One of my kids family tree shows all relatives, the other kids shows zero
At church Sunday, they helped my 12 year old set up a family tree account, and nobody other than his mom and dad appeared in it. My 9 year old wanted to set one up, so I helped her, and hers shows all generations of relatives. Any ideas what is wrong with my sons? Here's some general screenshots. I removed personal information. This is what shows on my son's app, the church membership # is correct. But my daughters shows grandparents, great grandparents, etc.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Answers
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Hi Jason Welcome to FamilySearch Community and posting your question about accounts for your children. It is hard to guess how they established your son's account, but it is not uncommon for the account to contain only the account holder and parents. At this point, the thing to do is just add the living people between your son and his deceased ancestors. Once you add the living people and link them their deceased ancestors, everything else with appear. For example, if your son's grandparents are still living, add them (they will have different ID than on your account). If his great grandparents are deceased, then link the grandparents to the deceased great grandparents. Everything after that will be in his tree. Hope this helps.
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It's bizarre though that my daughter (younger than him) has everything showing up no?
So if I understand what you're saying, I should link him to me and his mother using our record ID, and then his living grandparents, add them, and everything else should populate?
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You can't link your son to you because when he logs in your PID will not be visible. His should not be visible to you either although I am not a church member. If you log in as him, create a new "you" and your spouse too, then if the grandparents are deceased, you can like to the deceased grandparents. At that point he will have the same view as your daughter.
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Hi Jason, Yes you should link him to you and other living relatives. But you can't use your ID from your account. You have to manually enter the information for each living person, and they will have a separate ID for each account. If you notice on your daughters account, all the living IDs are different than on your account. Let me know if you need additional help.
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The initial setup of a tree for a new membership-linked account will use Church membership records to start the tree. For many members, this will result in an initial tree that has children, parents, and even grandparents (depending on how many of those people are/were Church members). It sounds like this is what happened for your daughter's tree.
This process only happens when the account is initially created. The very helpful usage of membership records to link to relatives only happens if the membership record number is connected to the account at the time the account is created. If you don't add the MRN at the time the account is created, then the tree that is created will just contain the one entry for the person on the account, and every other relative will have to be added manually. One possibility is that whoever helped your son create the account didn't have the MRN handy at the moment, and thought that the MRN could be added later, so they went ahead and created the account without it. It's true that you can add the MRN later, which will enable all the other membership-related features, but that one-time opportunity for the automatic building of a tree from membership records will have been lost.
The other possibility is that your son's membership record was not created correctly (that may well have been done 12 years ago when he had his baby blessing). When a membership record is created for a person, the clerk enters the names of the parents (and spouse, if applicable). There's a way to add those relatives with just their names (which is the clerk's only option if the relatives are not members of the Church), or to add them as members (which requires the clerk to have access to the MRN for those relatives). If the clerk added those relatives with only names, then when your son's initial tree was built using membership information, the system would have only been able to add his parents by name, and would not have been able to use the information on their membership records to find additional links to other related members. In this case, it would be wise to ask your ward clerk to help fix the membership record. But you'll still be stuck with adding living relatives to your son's tree manually until you connect to existing deceased ancestors.
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