Create a person from a record
can i create a person from a record. e.g. search conducted has results, the results are records but not attached to any tree. I want to create persons from the records.
Answers
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Yes, @Martin78632 you can create profiles in the tree from records found in a search.
I would caution that it's often not quite as straightforward as that sounds. The tree already contains over 1.2 billion profiles. Many of those are already duplicated or triplicated or worse. And, many records that are not yet attached to profiles are for someone already in the tree.
Some projects from BYU (Brigham Young University) create new profiles from records, such as various censuses and the US NUMIDENT (Social Security) record sets. And, we users regularly have to merge those new profiles because those records belong to people already represented in the tree.
I did a quick search on a common name to show you an example. I searched on the name John Jones, with no additional parameters. FamilySearch returned, almost instantly, over 6 million records.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/record/results?q.givenName=John&q.surname=JonesMany are already attached to profiles. I chose the first one NOT attached to a tree profile.
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:C68M-7T3Z
The record is for a 1917 death in England. Is that person already in the FamilySearch tree? Extensive research should be performed to ensure a new duplicate is not created.
You can see from this screenshot that it would be easy to create a new profile in the FS tree from this record. The question is, should we do that?
Hope this helps.
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Yes, you can create a person from a record in Family Search. If the names in the record do not match anyone already in Family Tree, you can add the name to Family Tree by following these steps:
- Open the Source Linker and view the record information.
- If the person is deceased and related to the focus person, drag and drop the name to the appropriate section and click Add to create a profile.
- If the person is not related, go to the Family Tree, click Add Unconnected Person, and enter the information from the record.
- Finally, attach the record to the new profile you created.
Make sure to review the information carefully before creating the new person.
Sources:
Unfinished Attachments - How to add Others on Record to Family Tree
Let me know if this helps by putting an awesome ❤️ on this post!
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As has been said, you can create a new entry in FS with a source you have found. There is a chance that person has already been created as explained above. Let me share some of my experiences.
I have crawled up and down and sideways all over my branches of the Family Tree. So much so, that I look for other interesting ways to build and grow the tree. These have included using Newspapers.com and looking up old articles of the origins of some of the local to me Foundries ( being a second generation job shop foundryman myself). When I identify some of these principals, I then create a new unconected person in FS, and then continue searching said name for more newspaper entries. As you add in 'lived in' locations, with dates; perhaps an obit that gives a death date, and family - with the addition of more and more vitals and relationships - FamilySearch will begin to suggest sources to link. More often than not, you will soon find sources that are already connected to an existing person in FS. When this happens, you merge your new person into the existing person already in FS. By now, you have also fleshed out the individual as well as family with more sources, details, and hopefully pictures.
Some examples: Earnest Duncan Womack G5DX-YJW
George Wilberforce Soule' L1H3-BKX
Morris Marshall P4V5-C5Q - see note on Morris, found him in a couple records, but can't confirm any life sources before or after the newspaper entries confirming his work in a local foundry.
One of my first -from scratch quests was: Charles Henry Keville G675-86S
This tidbit showing up in my facebook feed is what I had to go on:
Now he has a well documented life story here in FamilySearch.
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@Martin78632 So you have been warned, you have been told the procedure of how to do what you want to do, and you have been shown one person's way of doing something similar.
What you are thinking of doing can be of great value if done properly. If done incorrectly you will potentially attract a lot of upset users. If you have a few hours you can read through a discussion here about the project Ánie referres to that has upset and frustrated a lot of users. It illustrates the wrong way to do what you are considering.
Here are my thoughts.
Taking a random source and using it to create one profile or maybe a parent/child group which is floating loose in the tree is unlikely to help anyone until that day someone who actually is working in the family finds it as a duplicate and has to merge it away.
If you use a census source and create a small family group and if you just use that source you risk again creating a family group that is never found again and so pretty useless. This is because of the high rate of spelling errors in names and limited personal information in a census such as having just a birth year.
If you want to make significant contributions to Family Tree with the goal of really helping other users, then I would suggest you find a particular area of interest that you are will to develop good expertise in and focus there. Pick an area with recently indexed records so that you can be pretty sure they were not indexed during the time when indexed records went into the International Genealogical Index or the Vital Records Index. Both of those indexes were fully imported into Family Tree but the associated indexed sources were not necessarily attached to the Family Tree profiles created by those sources or there were multiple indexed sources and only one was attached to the profile.
For example, about 80% of my wife's ancestors lived on the island of Stord, Norway. The parish registers for Stord were indexed early on for about 1800 through 1877. All these people were added to Family Tree via the IGI or VRP. But only about a quarter of the indexed sources were attached to their profiles. Taking one of those unattached sources and creating a new profile has a 99.9% chance of creating a duplicate.
So here is what I have been doing over the past many years.
I started with the 1878 parish register for births on Stord. I am well acquainted with the area because I have visited there multiple times. I also have an excellent Bygebok (Community book) that covers the history of who lived at all of the farms from the middle ages until the early 1960s.
Going line by line through the parish register, one birth at a time, I find the child in the Bygdebok to get information about the family. Then I search for the child in Family Tree. If I can't find the child, I look for the parents. If I can't find the parents, I use the information in the Bygdebok to search for the grandparents. Almost always one, if not all four, of them are in Family Tree.
Working from there I add any missing grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings of the child by using the bygdebok; multiple census years; birth, marriage, and death records in the parish registers; and all the indexed sources I can find. Attaching all these sources as I go. Several years after starting this project a new index for these parish registers was released that covers from about 1750 to 1910 and all of these need to be attached to the proper profiles as well. Almost always by the time I am done, all four grandparents are correctly hooked into the main Family Tree and there are no isolated, free-floating branches and the entire family group has every possible indexed source and additional sources I have created attached to them. Properly doing one extended family can take a couple of weeks.
If I find the child already in Family Tree then it usually just takes a couple of days to do any needed cleaning up such as merging duplicates, adding additional information to the profiles, and attaching sources.
It's fun to see that about half the time within a couple of weeks of completing a family, other users are making use of these new profiles.
Now because Stord is a relatively small area with a very stable population through the centuries as far as limited people moving in or out, about 90% of the time it turns out that the child I added is some type of cousin to my wife.
I have to say, though, that the most satisfying part of this is to find that the child had an uncle who emigrated to America and is in Family Tree as a end-of-line ancestor whose descendants in America could never make the jump over the ocean. By adding the information I have documented from the Norwegian records and connecting him properly to his parents, I add an additional six to eight generation of ancestors to their line.
So, yes, you can create a person from a record but don't stop there. Create a lineage that is properly connected to the rest of the tree. And make sure you are doing this in a way that helps other users and does not just create more work for them.
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