FamilySearch, Observations

Costs:


While you do not have to pay money to use the site, you do yield all rights to your information  to LDS.


Reason to Use with Limitations:


Shared tree for collaboration (and hopefully centrally backed up). The basic premise is that all dead people are available to everybody and all live people are private to the an individual. I have not figured out how to use their helper id. I am unaware of having family groups share family info. There are some mechanisms to show who made changes. As a user you can follow individuals, and control text/email notifications on several aspects. It is also possible to get some notifications thru the familysearch app.

The tools suggests records for people. It also provides a task list that spans people. This mechanism allows for the entering of data with having to type it all in.

liked linking writing in a picture to a person in the tree



Reasons not to Use:


Giving up rights to your own information.


Recommended by folks using Ancestry, a pay for service. Is it tightly linked?


Very limited reports. 

I did not figure out how to export GEDCOM or bits that don't fit that standard.




Annoying aspects:


How do you store street addresses?  It wanted a standard that was only city, county, and country (linked to history). Not sure why I did not find a German location.

I found there was a lack of scaling in many contexts. Would have liked subdirectories, filter, and sort functionality.Additionally I would like to be able to follow all ancestors or descendants of an individual.

The documentation  seems to just show what you get by trial and error. For instance:   I do not understand workflow for adding a multipage document. It also did not  suggest formats for citations.I am not clear on memories versus sources.  Seems like a lot of duplication. Should I be contemplating  the rather daunting indexing hierarchy?

Why am I navigating using google search? ie https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2221801 Additionally for a while the two levels of navigation headers disappeared and I was entering URLS.

the discussion groups (community.familysearch.org) where being upgraded and I could not get in.

relativefinder gives up all private data and authenticates using the userid instead of the email.

It seems that there are a collection of android apps that offer some of the functionality of the website. The computer and the website are  better for data entry and full functionality. Did like apps for notifications and messaging

huh. don't think I was supposed to see that lynx message. now where have I heard that?

I have an uptick in advertising emails on genealogy.


Other directions to explore:

Who's the competition?

What should be used for the other reports and private records?

How should I process documents? (a repeat, I know)





Comments

  1. paffyApril 18, 2021 at 4:00 PM

    During a recent family genealogy zoom, we were introduced to some tools on https://familytech.byu.edu/ . I went back to see what else was there. I found one page genealogy generates graphical ancestor or descendant charts. See https://familytech.byu.edu/apps/one-page-genealogy.html . (I still prefer textual outline forms for easier reading, copy/paste, small file size...) . For grabbing family search IDs I hope I configured it so that FamilyTree>Following gives me a list.

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