Coastal Redwoods near Mendocino, CA
There are more new things on Family Search-Family Tree as always. What a viable site, there is never a static moment. This will be the most useful to people that have subscriptions to all or some of the Partner sites. If you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you can access all of the websites listed below for free when you sign up through Family Search. Search Partners in the Get Help section of the Family Search home page for more information.
A word of caution about this new feature: The accuracy of what you get is only as good as the information you have added into Family Tree. This new feature is like one stop shopping on the Person Details Page. I think this will work best when you are familiar enough with your person being researched. Starting from what you know and going to what you don't know yet is the key. The other thing is you still need to learn to search by filtering your hits on all on these cites. This is very important to researching. Be accurate in your attaching records to your tree.
A word of caution about this new feature: The accuracy of what you get is only as good as the information you have added into Family Tree. This new feature is like one stop shopping on the Person Details Page. I think this will work best when you are familiar enough with your person being researched. Starting from what you know and going to what you don't know yet is the key. The other thing is you still need to learn to search by filtering your hits on all on these cites. This is very important to researching. Be accurate in your attaching records to your tree.
The following is the FS blog post on this new feature. Enjoy. And thank you to Matt Wright!
"New Feature: Search Genealogy Records on the Web’s Largest Sites"
September 28, 2015 By
We have taken a step closer to the elusive genealogy “easy button.”
On the Person Page of each of your ancestors in FamilySearch Family Tree there are now three additional genealogy sites you can access for a genealogy records search.
In addition to FamilySearch (naturally) you will find logos for three of the largest family history websites. A simple click on any of the logos takes you to that site and initiates a global search of that site’s records. When you arrive at the site, you are already looking at the results of your search. Search results are based on whatever information you have for that person in FamilySearch Family Tree, so names, birth date, spouse name, etc. It is a simple and efficient way to search vast databases of genealogically relevant information with a single click.
Go to FamilySearch Family Tree and try it out on our own person page. From there you can jump around to ancestors and try searching genealogy records on the other sites to see what you can find. This is bound to speed up your research, and you just might discover records you have never seen before.
I have worked a bit on this feature and have noticed there are some definite issues with it. I am sure with some time and feedback it will be updated. When I first started using it I noticed that I could not view my browser tool bar when enables me to use Tree Connect (Also recently being called Record Seek.) This seems to be working now.
ReplyDeleteIf a patron is in the library they can look for records in the Library edition of Ancestry but they cannot attach them in Family Tree!
If the patron is a member we can
teach them how to access the free accounts. The other scenario is if the person has a personal subscription to any of them they can then sign on here in the library and attach the record to their family tree though Tree Connect. They need to sign off of that partner account before they leave their computer. This will not work well for them at home if they have not installed the Tree connect bookmarklet on their browser tool bar.
ReplyDeleteMy conclusion is it is pretty complicated right now. Also Randy Seevers mentioned in his blog this week that he put in one name on one of the partners brought up 254,000 hits. Maybe we should revisit this one when it is tweaked and improved.