New changes to attaching sources

LegacyUser

Barbara Jean Aylett said: I have a concern with the new changes to attaching a source where after you pick a person to attach their source you then have to pick that person again from a list of people. And or selecting to add the person the page that has a possible duplicate. These additional steps are really redundant, You are doing the same thing over and over. You have already chosen which person you want why do you have to choose them again? I think also for many people who are new to familytree and are struggling to add sources these can be discouraging and confusing, Things need to be simple and less time consuming.

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.

I am another user and held off in hopes that someone would respond who better understood your concerns.

One of the important aspects of dealing with any user concerns (and even those of us who have had quite a bit of experience dealing with FamilySearch, have concerns) is to be very specific in what is and what is not working for you.

You talk about attaching sources and since it has been a few weeks since i have attached a source, I wonder what you mean when you wrote

after you pick a person to attach their source you then have to pick that person again from a list of people.

The source linker has not changed much over the past year. But, some of the sources can be problematical. I'm looking at a death certificate for a relative of mine and the informant incorrectly identified the deceased person's parents. This is a problem that can result in errors in the tree.

But as far as the source linker is concerned, I'm not sure what you are describing, unless it happens to be something similar to what I'm looking at. The source linker has not significantly changed.

LegacyUser

Paul said: No, Barbara, I have not noticed any recent change, either. There has been a new merging tool added, but you do not seem to be referring to this. The list of individuals as alternatives as to whom to attach the source has been there for as long as I can remember.

LegacyUser

Cindy Hecker said: I did have this happen last night but it was not every time. I was a little confused but I guess I was not alone seeing it. I have seen that choice box to the right before but in different circumstances where I was on the source but wanted to add another person not part of the immediate family. (kind of hard to describe it exactly)

When I saw this flyout box I worried I would select the wrong person because I was trying to decide if 2 men needed to be merged and I wanted to make sure I was not selecting the other man (same name) who was not my person. I was building him in his current married family before deciding if he was the same man with his birth family.

I hope that the flyout choose a name box does not become standard. Would possible cause more errors.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: I know what she means. There appears to be a bug at the moment. Normally when performing a record search from a particular profile the system automatically picks up that profile as the one to attach the source to. By contrast when performing a record search without any particular profile then the system has no way of knowing which profile should be attached and so presents a list of recent profiles visited or a suggestion if it finds suitable profiles (possible but rare).

At the moment it's presenting the recents list even when performing record searches from a particular profile.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The record I was dealing with was a death certificate. The person's spouse was listed and because the focus of the source linker was on the parents of the deceased person, the spouse did not show up.

I chased down the ID of the spouse and switched things over and everything was fine. I suspect that I may have just had to change to the focus person of the death certificate and spouse would then have shown up without me having to go to my own records for the ID.

This is something that we have to deal with. It happens with marriage records, too, especially when the focus of the source linker is on the wrong spouse and the parents of the other person do not show up in the source linker.

I've seen this for a long, long time, so it is nothing new and to be honest, I don't know what could be done to resolve the problem without adding a lot of complexity to the persons listed from the tree.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thanks for clarifying this, David.