Family Tree Search by ID failure after using CET

Darris Williams

Working in Edge

1. I logged in to CET and viewed the Wrexham tree group then entered the England, Yorkshire CET. In this CET I viewed details on Jane Liquors GRBQ-NJ6, added a memory and tags to her and her husband Thomas Cook.
2. I opened a new tab in Edge then typed FamilySearch.org into the address bar. I went to the Catalog and did a film number search and viewed the record.
3. On the second tab I switched from the Catalog to Family Tree by clicking on the button in the top menu bar, then Find, then Find by ID. The search for a person in Family Tree with ID# MY6B-KY7 returned no results although she is in there. https://www.familysearch.org/search/tree/id?from=MY6B-KY7 "No Results Found" I expected to search Family Tree and find this person which I viewed the previous night.
4. I opened a different browser (Chrome) then went to FamilySearch, logged in, navigated to Family Tree and did a search (Find by ID) for MY6B-KY7 which took me to Hannah Gething as expected.

It appears that while working in CET in one tab, if I open a new tab and try to use Family Tree that the search stays with the CET rather than switching to Family Tree even though I clicked the Family Tree link. I expect the Family Tree link to take me completely into Family Tree, not show me I'm there but still keep connected to the data in CET. I have some screen shots if they may help duplicate the experience.

I logged out of all FamilySearch related tabs in Edge, opened a new tab, closed the FamilySearch tabs. In the new tab I put the FamilySearch URL into the browser address bar and logged into FamilySearch. Then I navigate to Family Tree and did a Find by ID search for MY6B-KY7 and was taken to the correct and complete entry for Hannah Gething as expected.

It appears that the link to FamilyTree from a CET is not making a clean and complete transition to Family Tree. I expect that link to complete the switch to Family Tree without the need to log out and back into FamilySearch or close tabs.

Robert Kehrer

Issues related to saving users state on the site is not unique to FamilySearch and presents a headache for web developers everywhere.

We discussed the issues of the site saving user location (which tree) and how this can present some unexpected experiences across our complex website. There may be some possibilities for addressing this in coming months and we will be exploring them. For now, if a user needs to have one window open to Family Tree and another window open to a CET, the simplest work around would be to use two different browsers.

There may be another issue at play here as well. Our full new Search system has not yet been deployed which will accommodate CET. It should be available very soon. When it is you will be able to do at least 3 kinds of searching

1) Search everything (search results will contain persons from Family Tree, CET, the various Society collections, etc)

2) Search a collection of trees (search results might contain only persons from the hundreds or thousands of trees in the Guild of One Name Studies collections, for example)

3) Search a single tree (search results contain only persons from the Wrexham CET.)

Darris Williams

Thanks for the information Robert. I will instruct my team to use two different browsers. Knowing about the issue and having a work around allows us to keep working.