Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Tuesday's Tip - Use "Record Hints" to Add Sources to FamilySearch Family Tree

This week's Tuesday's Tip is:  Use the "Record Hints" feature to add sources and content to the FamilySearch Family Tree.

In order to use FamilySearch Family Tree, you have to add your ancestral families to this "universal" (i.e., one tree = "our tree," not "my tree") family tree database.  Once your ancestral families are entered into the tree, then sources should be added in order to support the names, dates, places, events and relationships in the tree.

FamilySearch now provides "Record Hints" on the Family Tree profiles for persons in the tree, based on the records available in the indexed FamilySearch Historical Record Collections.

The "Record Hints" are similar to Ancestry's green leaf "Hints" on an Ancestry Member Tree - they indicate that FamilySearch has found a record for this person in their record collections.

These "Record Hints" appear at the top of the right-hand column on a person profile, viz:


This is the person Profile for my great-grandfather, Charles Auble (1849-1916).  When I opened his profile today, there was one "Record Hint" for him (note, I had already attached several others for him from census records).  The "Record Hint" is a Wisconsin marriage record for Charles Auble and his wife, Georgia[nna] Kemp.

I clicked on the "Record Hint" to determine if it was for my great-grandfather (two screens below):




The indexed information on the record is shown in the left-hand column on the screens above, and the information in the Family Tree is shown on the right-hand side of the screens above.  Persons named in the record are shown on the left and compared with persons in the Family Tree on the right.

I can decide to "Attach" this record to Charles Auble or decide that it is "Not a Match" with the two buttons below the "Reason to Attach Source" field on the screen above.

I decided that this is a match to my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, so I will click on the blue "Attach" button.  First, I need to enter a "Reason to Attach Source" and I did that as shown below:



After clicking on the blue "Attach" button, I have now attached the source to my great-grandfather's profile (as noted by the green background on the screen below):


However, I need to Attach it to my great-grandmother too, so I clicked on the circled "Attach" link on the screen above.  After I do that, the screen looks like this:

The record is now attached to both of my great-grandparents.  I chose not to attach the record to Charles Auble's parents, although the information was correct (but used initials).

Back in the Family Tree Profile for Charles Auble, I scrolled down to the "Sources" section, expanded the marriage source, and saw:


The source citation, the link to the record summary, and my reason for attaching it are included in the "Sources" entry.

This is the easiest way to attach a Source to a Profile in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  The bonus is the link to the record summary.

If you are using the FamilySearch Family Tree, I urge you to attach sources in this manner whenever you can.  You will be helping to add documentation to the Family Tree and, perhaps, find a record that adds to your documentation of your ancestral families.  In addition, you may be helping other researchers find records to help them in their own research.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/08/tuesdays-tip-use-record-hints-to-add.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


2 comments:

Justin said...

Just today on Find-A-Record we added support for record hints. Now you can generate a list of ancestors that have record hints available for review. http://blog.findarecord.com/2014/08/view-list-of-record-hints-for-your.html

Geolover said...

There is a recent error in the automatically-generated source citations on FamilySearch.

Notice the after the access date. The bride/groom names should have appeared there.

The designers were made aware of this problem a few days ago, but it is not fixed yet. I do not know if the names will start to fill in on the many incorrect citations when a fix is made.