Search in my own family tree

LegacyUser

Sebastian Neugebauer said: Thank you so much for your constant effort on the site. I would love to see a feature where you can search for an ancestor specifically in your family tree. This will help find a specific person to share stories about or put in new information, without having to go through all "find" options on the existing page.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome back 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.

Introducing FamilySearch Family Tree

FamilySearch FamilyTree is a single tree that is a collaborative effort, built around an open-edit model, allowing any person, including yourself to add to and make changes on any person who lived throughout history, including all of our deceased relatives.

There is no "my tree" in FamilySearch FamilyTree — it is a tree for all mankind. If you have found errors, you need to know why those errors are there. It could be that someone incorrectly combined another person's record with your relative. It could be that someone found a source that they thought applied to your relative, but it did not. It could be that someone just knew that their information was correct and entered that.

There are sites that support independent trees and building them. FamilySearch is not one of those sites.

If you are unfamiliar with how to work with the massive tree (now containing over 1.2 Billion persons), The Family History Guide (http://thefhguide.com/) is an approved training resource. It not only contains procedures for working with the site and the massive tree, but also exercises for you to use.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Many of us recommend maintaining a separate tree, either on a site that supports individual trees, or with a family tree management program. Three fully certified programs are available: Ancestral Quest, Legacy, and Roots Magic. Each one has its fans and also has a free version that allows you to become familiar with the program and decide which one works best for you.

The advantage to using a fully certified program is that it interfaces with the massive tree that currently contains over 1.2 Billion profiles. For most persons, the free version adequately meets their needs and can download your ancestral lines into a local database.

By maintaining a separate tree, you always have a base that you can return to if some other well-intended user believes that your relative is their relative and makes a mess of things. The integrated nature of the programs helps in restoring the information in the massive on-site tree, but at the same time, offers the ability for you to collaborate with others in researching your ancestral lines.

FamilySearch is still under development and there are sections of the tree that need further work. This forum serves to help us help each other in dealing with changes and "how to" information about the site. It is important to understand that while FamilySearch personnel read each discussion thread, there are limited resources and sometimes it can take years for a badly-needed feature to be implemented.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: I agree, it would be nice to be able to search your "scope of interest". This would make discovering your family stories a lot easier, especially if you only remember part of a story and a name.