Help with Contacts

LRLNorma

How do I organize contacts on the Contact page?

When the Contacts page opens, all contacts are displayed in one long vertical list. I want to organize them into folders by surname or ancestor because hovering over each contact info does not help me determine who we have in common.

The messaging app is just as disorganized. On the left-hand side, there is a long list of contact names. I want to organize them, too.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Alan E. Brown

@AnneLoForteWillson It's good to brainstorm options, but your Contacts and Friends lists are very different, and not connected to each other, so I think it's misleading to say that "options in the Friends page are based off of people in your Contacts list."

• You can freely add people to your Contacts list as you choose; proposed Friends have to accept your request before they can actually be on your Friends list.
• Contacts can be added as you encounter other users as contributors, participants at Relatives at RootsTech, chat senders, etc. Friends can't be added from any of those places.
• Your ability to add a friend is also limited by the fact that you can only add people who have allowed themselves to be seen in the global directory. So it's possible (probable, in my experience) that most of your contacts can't be added as friends at all.

So although it's a creative idea for an alternative method of communicating with other users, there's no practical way to build your Friends list from your existing Contacts, so it doesn't really help with the original question.

AnneLoForteWillson

I am afraid there is no way to organize your Contact list. They are listed in alphabetical order by the name.

LRLNorma

I appreciate what FS provides, but it is disappointing that there isn’t an option to organize contacts better.

Maybe the design was to use contacts to find others and take their contact info to our personal email Contacts rather than actually working from FS. I can do this if the other person is comfortable with the idea.

Thank you!

AnneLoForteWillson

@LRLNorma Actually, I was thinking about this and realized there are some organizational tools for your contacts list, but they aren't in the Contacts zone, they are available under the Memories > Family Feed settings.

You can make some contacts 'Friends' and you could post messages from the Feed to just MY FRIENDS. In the Friends section you can create lists and add people to these lists. You could create a list of people 'Researching on Chileans in California' or 'Descendants of Great-grandpa' and then post messages to these lists through the Family Feed. You would need teach your contacts to watch for messages in the Family Feed, rather than in the Chat.

All of these options in the Friends page (https://www.familysearch.org/en/home/friends/) are based off of people in your Contacts list.

LRLNorma

Thank you to everyone who responded to my question. Now, I have a better understanding of how Friends and Contacts work.

:-)