Like many Patrons who have struggled to incorporate their
Family History Research onto FamilySearch, I struggled to make myself work on
the website… It was slow, tedious and repetitive, and even adding one family
seemed to take for-ev-er! That has all changed!
Has it been awhile since you’ve been on FamilySearch and
worked on your Family Tree? Then you are in for a few surprises, such as being
able to Print, not only a Family Group Sheet, and Pedigree, but also the
Portrait Pedigree, which shows your family lines with the Thumbprint photos.
It’s beautiful and makes such a nice face page to the Genealogy Gift you have
planned for Christmas, and each page is dated, so you know how recent the
information is.
This past summer a Tips icon was added to the Pedigree page,
it looks like a lit light bulb in the lower left of your page, and not only
does it have ways you can navigate the Pedigree view, but short videos to help
those who learn by seeing it done.
Just this past week FamilySearch discontinued the Temple
Icons that were on a Person's Details page so all your Temple Requests and
information is now done from the Family Pedigree Tree. Using the Landscape,
Portrait or the new Descendancy views, you can work on finding Temple Requests
quickly and easily with the new color-coded icons. Also on the Pedigree pages
are Record Hints, Research Suggestions and Data Problems, especially
instructions for those obnoxious red exclamation marks!
Next nice surprise is the Descendancy Chart. You are going
to Fall in Love with this new way of seeing everyone in your family lines! At
first, I thought it was a waste of time, and then I discovered that we could
now look down through 4 generations! That brings up a multitude of Cousins.
Just think of it this way…
Starting with our 7th Great Grandfather, Johannes
C Schnee, Born in 1727, who had 15+ children, at least 10 lived beyond infancy,
and we have found records which support the marriages of 6 of their children.
By moving from the 1st Generation to the 4th, we increase
our view of people from 17 to 225, and we are still in the year 1870!
Using the Descendancy View we can see individuals who have
no sources to back up the records, and those records, which FamilySearch has
already discovered as a possible match, and we haven’t even moved off the
Pedigree pages yet.
What I appreciate the most about this view is being able to
see how everyone is related within each family without having to use scrollbars to move back and forth and try to keep all the information in my head, as
you would have to do when using the Portrait Pedigree. Unlike the Landscape
Pedigree view, the Descendancy view shows all the children without having to
hit down arrows, and again, using scroll bars to see all the children, plus you
can see which individuals need attention, without going to a Father’s Person
page, then checking each person individually…which was so very slow.
If you haven’t liked working with FamilySearch in the past,
come check it out now; you'll be surprised at how user friendly and easy it is to research and add to your Family Tree FamilySearch.org is today!
