Unrelated families

PattyPStockdale

I have been working on my family tree for years and love familysearch.org.

I also want to work on a couple families who are not connected nor related to me. To do this, do I need to start new accounts? Or can I do it within my account without connecting to my family tree?

Patty Stockdale

Gail Swihart Watson

Absolutely no need for a separate account. FamilySearch has one world tree and all deceased persons on the tree are available for edit and update by anyone. It is a collaborative tree.

Thus, when you refer to "my family tree", I presume you are either using the new private family group feature, because there are no individual trees in the world tree, or you are confused about the nature of the world tree.

I am a volunteer lineage researcher for a lineage society, and I put all my work and findings on the world tree, and I am almost never researching my own ancestors. We should all make positive contributions to the world tree.

PattyPStockdale

Thank you, so I would start or find an unrelated person (to me) and build from him? Patty

Gail Swihart Watson

Yes, you do a tree search to see if the person is on the tree. Remember many people have similar names and many people spelled their own names differently at different times, so I suggest using a spouse's name as part of the search criteria as well as birth and death information. If you don't find the person, search for a child and the child's spouse instead. Sometimes the names really changed a lot.

Good luck!

Wayland K Adams

Here are the instructions for adding an unrelated person in case the person is not already on the tree.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-add-an-unconnected-person-to-family-tree

Gordon Collett

Family Tree is really a poor term when it comes to FamilySearch's Family Tree. They really should come up with a different term. Or we users should and then insist on using it. Maybe if we can find a term that gets across what Family Tree is, we can finally make progress in changing people's perception of my tree, your tree, and all the attendant ownership confusion.

How about "The Human Network"? (Ugg, I don't like that either). But we need something that conveys something about what Family Tree looks like, which is:

This is not a tree. In this diagram from a site that provides free images, you see one way to look at the FamilySearch database of people. This is what we all see. This is all there is. And we all see and work in the same database. The dark dots are deceased people and all users can see them. The light dots are living people and each light dot is tagged with a list of users, usually just one user long at this point, who see a profile rather than the privacy camouflage of "ID not found" when they enter the ID number.

That's enough philosophizing for a Monday morning. Back to the question.

@PattyPStockdale when you want to enter an new node into the Human Network and you do not yet have any parent, spouse, or child in the network to connect that new node to, or to use the common terms, when you want to enter a new person into Family Tree that doesn't currently have a child, parent or spouse in the tree, you use the Add Unconnected Person link found a the bottom of your recent's list:

As you build out from that starting person by adding children, spouse, parents, in-laws, and so on, sooner or later you will run across a person who is already in the database. Maybe a great-aunt or something. When you do, do not create a duplicate profile, but instead use the pre-existing person after you have confirmed it really is the right profile. That is what connects the little, isolated network you created in the database with a dozen nodes to the main network of however hundreds of millions of nodes it has.

You didn't say what kind of a project you want to work on. Please be sure it is not something that dozens of other people have already done or are working on. Remember the goal in Family Tree is to have one profile for each person who has ever lived but only one profile.

In other words, please don't enter all the royal families of Europe again. And if it is a nice family history book published a hundred years ago, do check that twenty other people haven't already found that book and entered all the information from it. But if it is a project for a family friend who wants her deceased family in Family Tree but doesn't want to do the typing, and it will be all new information in Family Tree, sounds like a great project.

PattyPStockdale

Thank you, I appreciate your comments and have already started.

Gail Swihart Watson

But please don't create unlinked people until you have searched the tree (or whatever) vigilantly for several generations and found none.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@Gordon Collett, it's the Family Shrubbery. :-) Or Jungle? That'd convey the likelihood of getting lost in it, but I like the echoed initials of the FS FS.