how to "search" just my family tree
help! how do I search within only my family tree? I'm trying to locate a person added, and I have the last name, but can only figure out how to search the entire system.
Best Answer
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If you are trying to find someone in your family tree, the only way to do that is to search the entire tree, because, unlike other websites where you can have your own personal family tree, on FamilySearch we all use the same shared tree. This article explains exactly what Family Tree is and its purpose.
Also, in your question, you used the word "Search" instead of the word "Find." If you click the Search tab, you will be searching records or, in other words, sources of information about people. If you click Find in the Family Tree tab drop down list, you are searching for people added to the shared Family Tree by other users.
When you do a "Find" for someone in the tree, you can click on any of the results and then on Person at the bottom of the card that pops up. Then you can click View My Relationship on the person's page, and it will show you whether or not you are related, and if you are related, it will show you how.
Hope this helps.
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Answers
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@joy_gryffindor When you are not able to find a record you recently visited, remember the Recents list pulls up the last 50 people who record you opened.
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If you follow everyone on your family tree, in Family Tree on the web interface (not mobile device app) you can use the search bar on your Following page.
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Joy
[ Love that reference to "Harry Potter" ... it would want to be in 'Gryffindor' ]
Welcome to the "Community.FamilySearch" Forum.
I am just another 'lowly' User/Patron ...
Short Answer: You really CANNOT, in "Family Tree" of 'FamilySearch'.
That is to do with, the fact that, "Family Tree" of 'FamilySearch' is a SINGLE "One" World 'Tree' for ALL.
Question: Did you ADD the individual/person, you are looking for?
And, of course, how long ago?
Brett
ps: Years ago, when you could "Download" your "Ancestral" Lines, I tried; unfortunately, after about some x6 or more Hours; and, some 200,000 (or, it could have been x10 more than that) individuals/persons (and, Family Relationships), the WHOLE "Download" CRASHED, never to be able to be resurrected - I would hate to think what the SIZE of My "Ancestral" Lines are NOW.
.
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Both have been mentioned above, but I can confirm - from personal experience - the "Following" and "Find" features are very good ways of getting back to an individual entered in Family Tree.
In future, you should "Follow" any individual you are likely to want to get back to in the future. You then just have to visit your list at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/following/ and enter their name, from which you will have a direct link back to that person's record.
The "Find" feature (at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/find/name) can be a little more difficult in finding the individual you require, especially if their name is quite common. A "Match all exactly" search helps, but (depending on your other inputs) you will discover it usually on prioritises results and you still might have to scroll through a list of these before you eventually locate the correct individual.
You can "follow" up to 4,000 individuals (IDs) in Family Tree, so try to get in the habit of clicking on "Follow" on their pages, to get them on to your "Following" list. This should prove of great help in dealing with your issue.
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Hello @joy_gryffindor.
Another way to narrow the "find" effort would be to select an ancestor and then view his/her tree in Descendancy view. Once you extend the descendants out/down 4 generations you can use the computer's control F feature to search for a specific first or last name.
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You can use the options to both go down the tree, from an ancient ancestor, using the Descendancy view, or you may go up a family like using the portrait view
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One way that familysearch could give joy_gryffindor (and me) what we want, consistent with the "there is only one tree" philosophy, is if there were an option to present search results sorted by how closely the person is related to the searcher. Then if there were multiple hits for the search, I would be very likely to see the ones that are in "my tree". It seems like this would be possible to implement (but might take a lot of computational resources).
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This is a desirable feature but more in line with FamilySearch Partner sites than here. RelativeFinder would be where I would expect to find this.
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My siblings and I were talking about how it's super frustrating how you can't just search within the tree view. I had a suspicion the "well, this is a shared family tree so you'd be searching everything still" response would come up but I don't think that's an excuse to not improve the user experience.
I'm sure there's tons of people who want to just search for someone that's a direct line ancestor or search for someone within the first 5 generations, etc. Why not add a search bar within the tree viewing experience and allow it to search for near relatives like that using basic filters like "only search my direct line ancestors" or "only search ancestors within the first 5 generations". That way the user is much more likely to find what they're looking for rather than searching the whole database and having to sift through 50 people with the same name. And it would be a much more intuitive flow rather than having to leave the page you're on and feel completely disconnected from your tree.
I'm a product designer for The Church working on the Gospel Library app. I'd be happy to work together on a proof of concept if you guys are interested. Feel free to reach out to me directly.
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For suggestions there is the category Suggest an Idea.
As a step toward that feature, you might consider voting for a related idea: Tree view ancestor like descendant
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In the meantime one work-around is to export your direct ancestry tree to a desktop genealogy program and from there import it to Ancestry. On Ancestry you can limit a search to just one selected tree. For this a no-cost Ancestry guest account is enough.
This feature would be of no use to me here as I don't need to search my own personal ancestry on Family Tree. I might be interested in being able to search the ancestry of any selected profile in Family Tree.
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Amen!!! We need this functionality. I've spent hours looking for an individual because I'm forced to parse through the whole tree, not just my ancestor lines.
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The "one tree" argument does not work, because if I do a search and click on a name that comes up, familysearch can tell me whether I am related or not. If the person is not attached to me, they are not attached. It would be quite possible to limit the search to only people who are attached to me.
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@Rachel Kenning wrote: "It would be quite possible to limit the search to only people who are attached to me."
Would it, though? Obviously, it wouldn't work to run the "show relationship" routine before your search, on each and every profile in FS's Tree: there are over a billion of them, last I saw. So that leaves running the routine on each and every search result. If I search for, say, Trnyik Julianna with parents Trnyik János and Litavszky Zsuzsanna, that's "only" 19,000 or so results. If I figure one second per result for the "is this person related?" algorithm (which is very optimistic: it takes a noticable time to generate, so more like two or three seconds, minimum), that's a bit more than five hours. Would that work for you?
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