Keep me logged in
Hi,
I'm new here and I'm not an IT-expert.
Is there a possibility to keep me logged in as long as I want to, until I log out myself?
It is so annoying, that I always have to log in again and again,….
Thanks in advance
Julia
Best Answer
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Unfortunately, staying logged in is no longer possible. That option changed a couple of years ago. There was a great deal of discussion at the time. It was explained as a security change/feature.
I can generally stay logged in for about 24 hours maximum unless I close the browser.
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Answers
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I agree with you @Julia Andreasen and look forward to the response(s) you receive.
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I too usually stay logged in for about 24 hours, but I am able to close the browser (Firefox and Chrome). The log on for the forum seems to be a less than 24 hours
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Thank you for the quick responses.👍️ It looks like that I have to live with that.🙄
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@Julia Andreasen The short answer is that FS uses the timeouts to protect account privacy for all of its members. There is no specified timeout duration set by FS. (Opinion only, it appears to be contingent on usage. e.g., If you open your FS tab and don't use it at all, it may close out earlier than if you are constantly using it for a 24-hour period. ) FamilySearch is not the only genealogy site to do this; most of the other sites have also done this due to privacy laws, and they must comply with privacy and data‑protection standards. Just good sound security practices in an attempt to prevent the loss of data, as occurred with the 23&me data breach in 2023, in which 6.9 million people were affected, earlier the MyHeritage data breach, and so on in the wonderful world of the WWW. As far as I can find, since this is an IT-Security issue, no knowledge article was produced to explain it.
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There's an excellent video about this here https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/153649/sign-in-page/p5#Comment_558106
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@Julia Andreasen Thank you MandyShaw1 for finding this video.
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Security could be improved by implementing 2FA via TOTP. Then, everyone could use an authenticator app or password manager to lock down their accounts. That is more secure than allowing users to have short guessable passwords with the login getting cooked frequently like now.
This site doesn't store payment information. You'd have to make a tough argument that account data here is at greater risk than e-commerce platforms, like Amazon, which handle HTTP sessions properly while providing options for 2FA. Having to login every 24 h doesn't make it more convenient nor easier. This creates an illusion of safety only and I doubt the less tech-savvy are fooled by it.
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@DangKwei This would make a great suggestion. Please write up your suggestion using Suggest an Idea.
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Done.
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@DangKwei the site doesn't hold payment information, but any account that covers genealogical information on living people can, if breached, potentially expose person identifiable information for themselves and others: names, dates of birth, relationships, mother's maiden name, etc.
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Just in case there are people not aware of this, Family Search already has two factor authentication as an option. You can turn it on in your account Settings.
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The same could be said for Ancestry, but they have HTTP sessions working properly. Plus, they store payment information.
E-mail doesn't count as 2FA. SMS or TOTP does.
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@DangKwei what is the specific issue you are raising here? I am not clear whether it is the need to sign in regularly, limited 2FA support, more strategic information security concerns, or some combination of these.
Unfortunately we are ordinary users here, with no access to the engineers except via the Suggest an Idea process. From a Data Privacy/Data Protection perspective, this link may help (it also provides specific contact information including re GDPR): https://www.familysearch.org/en/legal/privacy
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@Julia Andreasen Getting back to your original question, when you say you have to log in again and again, exactly how often do you have to log in? I'm pretty sure that I only have to log in once as long as I continue to work in Family Tree.
Now if I walk away and don't do anything on the website, while I couldn't give an exact time, it still seems that it's at least twelve hours before I am automatically signed out. It's certainly not more than 24 hours. Has anyone tested this? It would be easy to do. Just sign on, don't do anything for 24 hours, then refresh the web page and see if you are still signed in. Then shorten the time by a few hours at a time.
In any event, if you are needing to sign in every five minutes, then something is not working right with your set up.
As to why we get automatically signed out, I'm sure FamilySearch has to deal with worst case scenarios. Last year when I was bemoaning limitations of the mobile app and expressed an opinion that some functions should not be allowed on the mobile app, I was informed that the majority of FamilySearch users do not have computers. They only use a mobile device (phone or tablet). I expect that some of them use public resources such as libraries or internet cafes. The automatic sign out is necessary to protect the data of living people that might be contained in a person's FamilySearch account when that user's device is open (or doesn't have a password on it) and the device gets stolen or if the user is on a public device and wanders off without signing out.
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I was on early this morning and left my computer at 7:40 am. Just now at 6:20 pm (it was a busy day) I refreshed the profile page I was on and am still logged in.
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My personal experience is that I do not get logged out when I work well past midnight, even if I have signed in in the morning. However, after I shutdown for the night (with or without signing off from Family Tree) I always have to sign in again next morning (say at around 10 am). Also, if I close the browser (usually Firefox) when I pop out during the day, then "Restore Previous Session" on my return, I am still logged in.
Actually, the current position with signing in/off is not really that useful with regards to security. If I'm in a public place using Family Tree and forget to sign out, anyone can come along and carry on working using my account. In theory, multiple users could do that, right up till the establishment closing at the end of the day.
In the past, the system was far more restrictive, with an automatic sign out within a relatively short time (I forget exactly how long) of one walking away from the computer.
In summary, I'm okay with the way things currently work from home (I don't find it too much of a pain signing in again next morning, even if I don't have to do this with Find My Past and some other applications), but do feel the suggestion that "security" is an issue doesn't make sense, as long as one can be left signed in for many hours if one forgets to sign out when using Family Tree in a public place.
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Perfect example - I've made a huge breakthrough on a family line that has puzzled genealogy experts for decades. I spent the last 3 days going name by name through the entire country of England in the 1590 - 1640 period and was finally able to locate missing birth records that were not previously located by researchers (family was over the county line and conventional searches were not finding them).
Of course, there are 2 or 3 family lines that are corrected wrong and I was working on carefully sorting out the different family lines, detaching sources, re-attaching sources, disconnecting relations, re-connecting them. I'd say I had about 30 pages open that I was using to cross reference and index my work. It got late, so I went to bed. This morning I'm presented with the log in screen. No big deal right?
I log in and EVERY SINGLE PAGE is reset to the log in screen. Even after I log in I am not take back to the page I was working on, just the https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/ page. So now I'll spend a few hours back tracking my work and re-doing much of my efforts again.
OK, you have to log in every 24 hours for security, great, at least keep the last page in cache so that I can go back to my work. This is very silly and seems an easy fix.
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As suggested in my previous post, it is possible not to lose all those individual, FamilySearch pages you have open in different tabs.
Using Firefox, I click on History, then Restore Previous Session, every morning. I log in on one tab and have no need to login again to get directly back to the other Family Tree pages I was viewing the previous day. I expect things are not quite so straightforward if one has closed down with different windows (not tabs) open, when using the same browser.
Perhaps review your browser settings and/or use Firefox, if you currently use another browser.
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@SJ Baty Something is wrong with your system configuration, privacy settings or something.
I use Safari. When done for the day, I just leave all my tabs open and switch to my computer’s main login screen. The next day I login, refresh whatever FamilySearch page is on top which brings up the FamilySearch login page, and login. The page I was on returns exactly as it was. When I go to any other window or tab, they are already logged in and just as I left them the day before so I can continue working where I left off.
I only close Safari every few weeks when I want to get a clean start on something new. I only restart my computer about every six months or more or if I get so many programs fighting for resources that I need to clean up.
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I have a similar experience. On Chrome, logging in on one open tab, doesn't automatically re-set the other open tabs that are now all on the log-in screen.
A partial work-around I've found is to log in on one tab. If it takes you to a generic search page, you can try hitting your back button a couple times to take you back to the page it was on; this may work if you were on a profile or record page. On the other tabs select all the URL text in the navigation bar up to and including the "=", delete it and hit return. That will take you back to the page and the browser recognizes you are logged in. It's a little quicker than repeatedly logging in and hitting the back button.
Unfortunately, if the page was search results (like full-text and more recently the family tree search), those results are completely gone and I need to start over.
I, too, wish there was an option to stay logged in, as I do on Ancestry, MH and several other sites. Maybe this is something we'll get in the future. But in the mean time, I make sure to plan ahead.
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So the question is, why the dramatic difference for some people when using Chrome? Is it something in privacy settings? Is it an installed extension? Is it due to a VPN making it so that when someone comes back to work the website can't tell it is the same computer?
Browsers with non-standard user set configuration specific problems can be very hard to track down. To determine why I can keep everything open just fine and logging in once a day is a trivial task that does not lose any page I am on when using macOS Tahoe 26.2 with Safari 26.2 with all default settings and no extensions installed and you cannot when using your particular configuration will probably require you to list your computer or other device, operating system and version, browser and version, all extensions installed, and every setting in the browser you changed after installing it and whether you are using a clean, direct internet connection or a VPN or other anonymizing method of connecting to FamilySearch.
They will also likely need to know exactly what you do when leaving the web site which would determine its state when you return. As I explained above, I don't do anything. I just switch to the log in screen.
If the software engineers cannot replicate your problem, there is no way they can fix it. The website is designed to let users be right back where they were working if their session times out and they have to log back in.
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