How reliable is the name filter in the "My Changes" list?
A contributor chatted to me about a profile that I had changed in December 2025. I attempted to find the changes I had made by searching in the My Contributions —> My Changes list. I could not find the profile with any search, even when I specified just her last name, or when I specified just her very unusual first name.
I found the profile from the normal FamilySearch profile search. I had made changes to her birth and burial. Because I did that three months ago, there is no way that I can scroll down the My Changes list to find those changes.
I've just done a few tests on profiles that I know that I have changed. In one such case, I entered a filter criterion of a particular family surname. The filter returned changes to one person whose second name was my filter criterion (ranging from 2021 to 2026), and one person who was his son but did not have my filter criterion in his name. It did not return any other changes. In particular, it did not return my gt-gt-grandmother, whose surname is my filter criterion; I had attached sources to her profile in 2023 and 2024.
Answers
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Hi Personally, I never use My Change list. it is just too big and cumbersome. I go to the person page for the person of interest. Under the details tab on the right hand side you will find the latest changes. I select show all, which shows all the changes made by anyone to the specific profile. You can filter on different criteria to narrow the search. In this method, you are looking at all the changes made by anyone to a single profile. When you look at My changes, you are looking at all the changes you have made to any number of profiles.
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@Wayland K Adams I agree that the My Change list is limited if you are just scrolling down it. It does become very slow after about 5000 changes are loaded. However, my problem was that the user who messaged me didn't give the profile person's name in enough detail for me to find find the profile through the Search / Family Tree in the first instance. So, I resorted to looking in My Changes to try to find changes I had made to people with the last name. I found nothing. Even after I eventually found the profile and could see that I had changed the death and burial vitals, I could not find her in My Changes. (Her name had never been changed since the profile was created.)
The message that I got contained an embedded, hyperlinked "Thank You!" widget. That pointed to the generic URL: https://www.familysearch.org/en/campaign/contributors, so I assume that it came from a participant in some FamilySearch campaign of some sort. When I went to that link, I found that I could send such a message to various other users who have made contributions to my area of the family tree.
Here is an example of another message of the same type that I received the same day.
While I waited for clarification from the user as to which Watkins family they referred to, or who "George" is, I looked in My Changes for "Watkins". Result: nothing.
That's when I started experimenting with names of people whose profiles I know have updated. From that, I found that the search is very unreliable.
I can rephrase my original question: How does the Search by Name work in My Changes, and is it documented anywhere?
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