how do I open Fan View and enter name of Ancester?
My grandmother's great Grand father was fredrich Schnabel, born near Konigsberg, Prussia born around 1821. Attended konigsberg Medical college in the 1850' Recruited by the US Union Army as a doctor or Army field hospital assistant and brought to the US in 1850. My Grandmother's name was Amelia Ruehl [nee Amelia Schnabel]1899-1963 How can I obtain any records you may have? Is there a fee?
PS Fredrich middle name was George, and he may have used that comin to the US. also, he was jewish, and I heard the Russians purged all Jewish records when they took over Prussia and named it Kaliningraad when they occupied it after WWII.
Answers
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What more information would you need to find any results for my query?
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I found this person on Family Tree:
She seems to be a good match for your grandmother, even though there are some differences from the information you provided.
There is never a fee for using FamilySearch.
Family Tree is a collaborative effort. You can see an overview of how it works here.
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First: this Community where you've posted your question is an online public forum for fellow users of the FamilySearch website (like you and me) to communicate with each other. Contributions from actual FS employees are rare, and they almost never have time to help with specifics of research. (That's not their job.)
Second: everything on FamilySearch is completely and entirely free of charge. (If you see a webpage claiming to be FS but trying to charge you a fee, please report it as fraud.) Note, though, that this is not the same thing as "everything is freely available": you need to be signed in to see most things, and your type of account (public [like mine] or LDS) and place of access (Family History Center, Affiliate Library, or home/elsewhere) may also affect what you can see.
Third: FamilySearch's website is a vast sprawl of interconnected things. Conceptually, I break it into two main components: Records and the Tree. These are supplemented with many side/assistant components, such as the Catalog, the Research Wiki, and Indexing, and they're all connected to each other in various ways. (And often look very similar to each other, even though they're rather completely different things.)
The Records component of FS can itself be divided into two main parts: images and indexes. Some records (the vast majority, actually) in FS's holdings only exist as digital images, many based on microfilms, some scanned directly from the paper. Other records are held by other companies/websites, and FS only has the index, not the images. Some records have both the image and the index on FS; the two are normally connected in such cases, but depending on the age of the index and other factors, the associations can be incorrect (such as being off by one, because one system started counting at one, the other at zero).
The other main component of FS is the Family Tree. Yes, the Tree, singular: it's a collaborative, open-edit tree, intended to have one and only one profile per deceased person. Note that — despite any conclusions you may see in it attributed to "FamilySearch" — it is entirely user-contributed. FS employee involvement is restricted to a few very narrow areas (such as private, confidential, or read-only profiles). (Things credited to FS, especially those dated to 2012, are generally legacy data: they were originally entered in one of FS's prior systems. Privacy and other considerations prevented the individual identification of the contributors when the data was imported into the current system.)
@William68960, I haven't looked for your family, primarily because I'm being lazy <grin>, but with the excuse that this gives you the opportunity to learn how things work by looking yourself. You can start by seeing if anyone has already done some of the research on your ancestors: go to Family Tree - Find (or Search - Family Tree, which is the same thing) and enter some of the details. The matching algorithms are pretty good, but not infallible, so keep an open mind.
Regardless of the results of the search in the Tree, you can also search FS's indexed records: go to Search - Records and enter some of the details, again. (The Tree versus Records search pages are an example of FS's parts looking confusingly similar.) Note that the algorithm doesn't rule anything out, it just ranks the entries. For example, if you put in a birthdate range for which there are no good matches, you'll see entries for people born in entirely different centuries (but whose names and other details match your inputs).
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Julia has given you an excellent overview of FamilySearch; Alan has found what appears to be your family.
You asked
how do I open Fan View and enter name of Ancester?
The FamilySearch Family Tree works the other way around. If your ancestor has a profile in the collaborative tree, he or she will appear in the Fan View working back from your profile as the root. The Fan View displays what has been entered by the collaborative community.
This Community also has specific location Research Groups where users help each other with research questions.
Best of luck with the research.
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