I’ve added all i know
I don’t understand how to find people past my grandparents. Ive seen plenty of first time users fill in less info than I have . It’s Like it auto fill all the info for them and gave them all sorts of leads to fallow . What’s wrong with mine
Answers
-
Could you give me a bit more information so I can do some searching and explaining. I need the names and PID (number that FamilySearch has given the person) of your grandparents. There is no auto fill that I know of. There are hints provided depending on the information you have input into their record. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Carol Ann Selander
Family History Volunteer
0 -
@Macias Corona, Abiel i can empathize with you. It took me years and lots of forums and searching to start finding info. At some point I realized that if I looked at others trees who I shared an ancestor with, I could find clues to help in my research. It’s hard to have the patience I know... I have none at all lol... but like @Carol Ann1 said, if you share what you know about your grandparents here (names, locations, birthdates, death, burial, etc) it will help us to help you:) even the smallest little thing can be helpful
0 -
by "auto fill" I assume what she meant was - when a person on a dead branch is linked to another a person already in FS FT and then voila - the whole family tree backswards populates miraculously (because it was already in FS FT) - the link was just established to it - and it "auto fills."
not everyone will have that experience - especially people from countries outside the US
0 -
Dennis,
Thanks for this explanation. So good to be working with someone like you who looks further outside the box than I did.
Carol
0 -
I can think of two ways that a tree on FS could sort of "autofill": linking up with a branch that's already on FS (a "communal tree moment"), or hitting a place and time with lots of indexed data that the hinting system can serve up.
I've been at least dabbling at the tree on FS for basically a decade now. My first-ever "communal tree moment" was less than two years ago, on a side branch of a side branch. I have since linked up with the work of other FS users twice, meaning that I have had a grand total of three of these experiences in ten years. The plus side is, I've never encountered one of those wholesale messes that people tell horror stories about.
A fairly large proportion of both my and my spouse's ancestors were from places and denominations that have not been indexed, neither on FS nor elsewhere, so I have only limited experience with the sort of branch that nearly fills itself due to record hints. I console myself that at least this way, I don't have extraction-program-based legacy profiles to merge.
The question of "how to find people past my grandparents" cannot be answered without the specifics. In some places, you can just put some names and dates in Records Search and have a good chance of turning up something relevant; in other places, the chance of getting anything useful that way is exactly zero. The latter is the case if the records have not been indexed, which is the case for the overwhelming majority of FS's (vast) holdings.
The FamilySearch Wiki can be a good starting point for figuring out what's available and where for your specific places.
0
