Need an addition filter for My Relatives Only when conducting a search.

LegacyUser

Daniel Roger O'Bryant said: A Suggestion: a filter that limits a search to individuals that I am already related to, would be a big help. Example: I know I am related to some with last name “Davis” in Nottingham, England. There are a lot of Davis’s there. If I could get a list of my own known relatives in that city, it would allow me to focus my effort on connecting to my ancestors. If this is already possible, I would love to know how. It seems like a simple filter would be an option. danobryant@yahoo.com

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community support forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

The question is first, how would the program know if a person in Nottingham is your relative or not? A quick search on just the residence revealed 7,266 Results for Name: Davis Residence place: Nottingham, England. Of the first 100 names in the list, only three have been attached to the massive tree with its 1.2 Billion names.

It isn't a matter of a simple filter, and if it is, then you can set it up yourself, but not based on what you may or may not have done outside FamilySearch. Or, for that matter, what sources you have already attached to your family in the massive Family Tree with over 1.2 Billion names.

The data available for searching is enormous and to be successful, you need to be able to search for specific information. It is like going to the FamilyHistory Library in Salt Lake City, or the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana (it has the second largest genealogical collection behind Salt Lake in the United States.

Without specific goals in mind -- I want to find a record for Thomas Davis who living in Nottingham, England in the 19th century -- you could find what you are looking for with a broad search, but you'll have more success if you narrow that search and there are several ways to do that.

LegacyUser

Daniel Roger O'Bryant said: Yes, there are a lot of Davis names in Nottingham. There are at least a couple of hundred with ID numbers. Some are unattached to the tree, mostly created by FamSearch based solely upon a birth or marriage record. But some family lines ARE attached to the tree. If I open one of those in “Person” view and select the “Show My Relationship” Option, it might indicate that this person is my 5th great grandfather, or that there is “No known relationship”. This is what I mean by Fam Search knowing that I am related. I’m not suggesting the program knows my ‘unknown relatives’

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Not possible. The amount of computing resources it would require to calculate your relatives each search run would be enormous. Something that WOULD be useful and would not be too costly in computer resources would be indicating whether a source is attached to the record a search was just run from or just attached to some record. Obviously for pure historical records searches that would not be triggered as the system would have no way of indicating which is the "home" person to check the attachments against.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Okay, that helps.

I use Ancestral Quest as my working copy for researching my family. First, it allows me to attach all sources I find, no matter where I find them. It provides a good interface with FamilySearch, which allows me to find the same sources (if they exist) within the Historical Records collection at FamilySearch.

My relationship is automatically shown (spelled out) by the program.

All three of the fully certified family tree management programs in the Solutions Gallery (which include Legacy and Roots Magic) have similar features.

David Newton makes a good point -- the amount of computing power to determine prior to displaying search results will be a major stumbling block in producing this kind of result.

I'm not saying it cannot be done and would be very neat feature if implemented, but I'm not sure I would want to see it automatically indicate my relatives or not.

And, as far as the Historical Records are concerned, it won't be very reliable because unless the record is already attached to someone in the tree, your relationship cannot be displayed. The tree is the central point of reference for displaying your relationship to any person.

Now, if you are talking about only those persons in the tree, then that is certainly possible if I use the Find routine (such as using the Find Similar People feature). However, I'm not sure how useful that would be, except for coming up with possible duplicates. In which case that particular feature works very well because it goes beyond what the duplicate checking feature does. In particular, it is going to find those "orphan" records which are not connected to any branch of the tree, or are in a remote branch. That becomes very helpful...

The only problem is that it does not have a location filter, which is something you will need to make the best use of the Find Similar People feature.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I just checked and the find feature lacks any kind of place filter. That's a problem I hadn't noticed before and needs to be added to the routine.

LegacyUser

Daniel Roger O'Bryant said: Thanks for the comments. I may be doing my family history backwards....from the unknown to the known... while FamSearch is built for going from the known to the unknown. But I spend hours and hours trying to link additional names on a census or birth record, to a name I already know in my tree. So, when I have a number of ancestors in a certain town, I try to get all of my known family names in the whole town into FamSearch, including birth records, censuses, etc. Once they are all loaded and grouped into families, I can start linking them to existing lines in FamSearch. It takes a while do it this way, but when I find a new line in a town, I can find generations of relatives, with which I share an ancestor, that aren't in FamSearch at all. One line a month ago yielded 300 new ancestors through the late 1700s up to the early 1900s, that our family had not previously known we were related to....generation after generation, mostly in the same town in England. My method is to download all of the birth records, death records, and censuses into a spreadsheet, do some sorting, and to analyze dates and names and piece together the relatives in that town. In most towns in England, I find maybe 5% of the town with a FamSearch Person ID, so there is a huge potential to find names that haven't previously been researched. The problem I'm trying to solve is: with the hundreds of names I might find on these historical records, while I can see which ones are attached to an ID, I can't find out which of those IDs I am related to. To do so, I have to open each one individually and select "Show my relationship". That can take a long long time.

I can't be the only one doing things this way. Maybe a 3rd party program can do it. My family uses RootsMagic...but it just seems like one more hungry mouth to feed with data, so I have avoided it....hoping FamSearch had a way.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: That's an interesting approach, but worth of consideration. I have several areas where my ancestral families lived for more than two centuries and I've often thought about adding all the families to my own genealogy. But after looking at how I would best handle this (aside from the grouping into family units), I decided it was more work than worth the effort, especially since I had so much dropped into my lap as it was.

Roots Magic is a good program and a lot of people really favor it. The advantage is that it can interconnect with both FamilySearch and Ancestry, allowing a user to upgrade back and forth (selectively, of course) between all three programs (RM, Ancestry, and FamilySearch). Of the three, it is the only one that features such an interface. The other two (Ancestral Quest, which I use, and Legacy) do not have the ability to interface with Ancestry, but can with FamilySearch.

Just what you are doing with respect to your family name people on FamilySearch is going to help. Eventually, they should connect into the massive tree but right now, a lot has to be added.

I suspect that eventually, most of those family groups will connect via some means to the others in that same county.

Thanks for your comments and how you are approaching your family. By the way, one of the things that I emphasize in teaching courses on beginning genealogy is that there is no one way to do the research. Thanks again for your input.