Is there a way to search for ancestors already in my FamilySearch tree?
As a consultant, I get asked this question all the time, as most other Family History programs have a way to do this, (even the good old PAF could do it), but I’m stumped as to how to do it in the FamilySearch App. Example, I open the FS App. Looking at the tree. Looking for a GGG Aunts grandson for whom I know the name, but can’t remember to which aunts line they belong. Thus to hunt and search takes some time opening upwards and downwards through each line until stumbling across the correct line in the tree. There must be a quick way to search for a name already in the tree!
Answers
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Yes, but you will need to know the ID number or a little info about an event. If you are on an Iphone, there are the three little dots in the bottom right hand corner. Click on those and then choose “find a person.” You will have the option to search for their name and an event, or the ID number. If it’s an uncommon name, you might find it fairly fast with the name only.
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Its the same way you search for anyone in FS FT
from this find screen:
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/find/name
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Thanks Carol and Dennis. This I have tried this and can still be a very long and slow process. I’m sure as you know ‘back in the day’ there was a lot fewer variations on names so searching this way often brings up many, many names that still need to be checked one by one, until coming across the right one. I’m hoping for a way that only looks for names already in a specific persons tree, like say mine. Not every person in everyone’s tree in the whole family search world, with the same or similar name. It is also not to likely we can remember everyone in our trees ID number. So that also does not really help!
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Its one database - it is not partitioned into "individual family trees"
I myself if I go back 20-30 generations have millions of people in my family tree
NO - you will never be able to remember them all.
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. . . back in the day - - people had their own local private database
of a few hundred or thousand entries - so yes - there was way to browse that list
as far as I know there is no way to get a list of
"all the people in my family tree X generations back"
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I was afraid of this - no filter that can look only in data connected to a user. Too bad as this creates a lot of time wasting for myself and many users that keep asking this same question of me. Oh well, we have to go with what we have!
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yeh - but like I said "connected to a user" is a very slipper slope
there can very quickly be millions of people interlinked to us.
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note that you can see a very large set of the family tree
by doing a "descendants view" and then expanding out to like 3 or 4 generations.
so if you chose your grandfather
and did a descendants view of 4 generations - you would indeed see a large list of people - though not in alphabetical order - you can do a "Find" in the browser window.
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also be aware that there are options to download section of the tree - to programs like Rootsmagic
so you could do searches and reporting int he ways you used to.
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I know it can be frustrating. Be sure to give feedback to FamilySearch. You can view your relationship going backwards. Maybe one day the feature you ask might exist.
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you can also view relationships going forward - with the "descendants view" on a given ancestor - and see all (many of ) your "cousins"
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Thanks all for your input. I can see where some of the issue comes from now. Too many of my users only able to use the App. The best solutions here come only when in the program via the Web, not using the App as I don’t see any way to select dependency views or charts. I can see the Descendants view does help find who you are looking for a little easier, at least up to up to 4 generations. You just have to run back and forth through each descendant and select to view the descendants chart. I’m not sure if this is much quicker, and certainly as the global family data base gets bigger and bigger, locating these descendants in your tree will take longer and longer. Oh well, at least I can now suggest another way to help find those ‘long lost cousins, 4 times removed’!
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as long as I know a name and a spouse and maybe a parent name
I just use the normal FIND search and it works just fine.
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the database is already over a billion records and has been for some time.
any change from last year, to this year, to next year
would be totally neglible as to the size of the database and its impact on searches
as far as "things getting worse" - I dont see any significant worsening.
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I didnt quite understand this sentence
" You just have to run back and forth through each descendant and select to view the descendants chart."
I would think 90% of the time the person would know which ancestor to choose from
when trying to hunt down the specific relationship of a cousin.
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Yeh - using a smart phone and using a 27 inch monitor is like night and day
I would go nuts trying to navigate a tree on a smart phone.
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I guess I didn’t explain very well. I’ll try to take an example from my tree, for a question I get asked. My grandparents refer to a great Aunty Janet, who had a grandson, having only their first name, whom I am trying to locate/identify. So I manage to ascertain her last name Is Martin. So in the App, without any descendent View option, I look at my tree. I can eliminate 1/2, knowing which grandparents we are referring to. Now I can only expand one garandparent side at a time, giving 4 selections (Parents) to open one by one, the then parents of parents (8 seperate view selections) To look at siblings for this Aunty Janet. Once I find her, now I need to open the tree for their dozens children, one by one, looking at each of their children’s families, tracking down the specific grandchild.
Keeping in mind these users asking for help are often not power users or long term genealogists, they have linked themselves into a fairly well developed tree, and so often don’t yet know many details that can help with a find function. Sometimes they recognise a detail or two as you go through the tree lines, but if the line is the 8th grandchild of the 8th child of the 4th parent, that we look through, we have easily spent 30 minutes or more‘looking’.
Going straight to ‘find’ Aunt Janet Martin bring up results page with up to 6 persons not showing her, as we have not enough detail, so have to select ‘more’ a few times until she shows up to select. And this only works IF they can remember other details to pick up on. If they don’t know any other detail, then back to the search the lines one by one, or open the ‘find’ results people, one by one, also looking for the details to pick up on.
As you, and other mentioned further on, if I can get them logged in via a Web browser instead, looking through descendency charts 4 gen view let’s us see more of the relatives in a quicker view. So for now, this seems to be the way to go.
I can visualise, as the ‘world’ family adds more and more relatives into these lines, this method of finding takes longer and longer with more sub lines to look through. Thus I was hoping that a better filtering function might have been hiding somewhere in the programming.
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some interesting side questions:
1) If you have 2 parents, 4 G parents 8 GG parents
how many ancestors do you have 20 generations back?
2) If someone came to America in 1620
and had 5 children, and those 5 children on average had 5 children of their own
how many descendants would this immigrant have 10 generations later?
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I like that Ancestry.com has a search for names in the tree created when I brought 4 generations over from FamilySearch. Then I open that person's page from the little syncing with FamilySearch drop down.
I have extended the Ancestry.com tree by adding the 4 more generations.
A video about the Ancestry Tree syncing is in BYU Basics Videos.
https://fh.lib.byu.edu/classes-and-webinars/basic-tutorials/
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Thats because in Ancestry everyone has their own tree (of a few hundred or thousand people)
thats a totally different paradigm than FS - where there is one family tree that we all share (of BILLIONS of records)
its apples and oranges.
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It would be really nice to be able to search the FamilySearch tree though, setting specific parameters (what person to start from, how many generations back to search, how many generations out and down to search, etc.). It's clear the whole tree can't be searched, but it would be nice to be able to search the "tree trunks" close to you.
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I think there may be something "in the works"
I will check around.
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Now that’s the answer I was hoping for! I fully understand the issues with a global data base, and the differences between it and small local databases that programs like PAF and ancestry built. But there are many other programs that use massive databases that can be searched and filtered with parameters to make it so you can find and pull out whatever data you want. My industry has data bases with many billions more data chunks in it than FamilySearch does, and I can search for info in it using a filter input form. You just need a good filter entry page to make sure you can get what you want, and filter out what you don’t want.
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yes - I think something like this may be int he works - but I dont work for FS - so dont know for sure.
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