Family Search

I have entered lots of people. Probably a few hundred ancestors and their kin. I try very hard to get absolute proof of a relationship. If the proof is flimsy, then I say so in the notes. For example, an 8 great grandfather born in 1700 in Aublain, and a person with the same name gets married in 1727, There are no other candidate people with the same name born in the same town or towns nearby that could be the person getting married, so I take a calculated guess and make this the same person. It is far better if the marriage has the grooms parents names, than the proof is very good. The familyhistory tree allows all this stuff and I communicate with others who add to my tree, if I see some flaky connections. Or I will add a note that the connection could be flaky. So overall I am happy with this website and it is free.

I used to be able to find something fairly useful on familysearch.org, but not any more. Their search engines are hopeless, ignoring any refinements you make. You have to trawl through results which shouldn't be there based on what you entered. No longer will you find the name of a spouse - instead there's a list of a number of people (presumably witnesses included) any of which could be the spouse. If you search for a marriage, the name you entered comes up as the father of the bride or groom, not the person who was marrying. Hopeless website.

I have been in this site for years they allow you free searches unless ancestry. All of a sudden I'm getting things like your great grandmother was born etc now I go and look at my tree and there Are people added to MY tree and they are not my family. So I write them and as it turns out they let other people add to your tree and they think it's fine. It's not fine especially if it's the wrong information. I think I know my own family and when I tried to delete or change the wrong info it wouldn't let me! I will never deal with them again. It should be up to me if I want to allow that or not. It really got me upset with them. So be careful should this happen to you.

Familysearch is run by the same silly people who operate FINDAGRAVE. If you enjoy bickering with non family members over great great great Aunt Tillie having 5 kids instead of 4 go for it. Some people r tuned into havoc and general foolishness.

I used to absolutely love Family Search. I could find a birth/baptism record which would show the person's parents and a marriage record which would show the father of the bride/groom. I don't know what they've done with it but all you seem to get now is a basic record of a persons birth/baptism/marriage. No different to freebmd.

Also, as with Ancestry, even whey you ask for an exact record, you still get a mixture of records.

If you do it there way and tick for a birth or marriage - you get "No records".

It used to be a really interesting and informative site. What a shame.

Whatever you've done, please revert to the old system.

Family Search is the genealogy research window for the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS). This organization has been working extensively on genealogy research and digitizing and indexing such data stores. The site allows search with multiple edits without even requiring an account. If you do create an account this allows you to save records for easy retrieval. There is no fee. Many of the record retrievals link to digitized actual documents. In some cases the result will only give a summary because the actual record is housed at another site which requires an account. This is not often a big issue.

I keep my actual family tree records on MyHeritage but I use Familysearch for the majority of my record research. This is a tool every genealogist should have readily available.

I enjoyed Family Search when I first started using it but it's horrendous that verified, documented family lines can be removed at anyone's whim. It just isn't worth the hassle to argue with people. I know there's a better site run by the Morman's that's more accurate and info can't be readily changed. But only members of the church have access. I would pay to have access to it but it isn't available.
I'll give 3 examples of my frustration,
1: The woman that continually changes my mother's info insisting that she died in NY and that she wasn't my mother. She died in Colorado and most definitely was my mother.
2: The person who doesn't like that my great-great grandfathers date of birth varies by 2 years depending on which record you believe and keeps deleting his info thereby erasing his entire line. I have 16 documents proving he is who I say he is and the difference in dates is between a doctors ledger of his birth and a baptismal certificate. A minor issue but he's continually deleted.
3: This one is the strangest one but I've heard other people have run into similar issues. There is a person who doesn't like that one of our family trees goes back to a King that she feels was unchristian and doesn't want him in her line. So she keeps deleting the whole line.
I've read about people who have said they've had lines erased because others don't want anyone who has been divorced in there line.

It's an ok site to find info but it's much better to use it as a resource and build your own tree through a different site.

I submitted my family tree long ago to the familysearch.com website and returned recently to see much of my accurate information wrongly changed by people who aren't even on my family tree. (I've been researching for 40 years and alive when many of the people on my tree were also alive.) I'm not talking about small changes either. People are being given the wrong parentage. I'm able to change it back, but there have been a few unrelated people who keep changing the information and will do it again. The site is GREAT for gathering records for free, but their family tree system is horribly flawed. People who use one source for information changes and do not look at all the information available as a whole are the problem. (Especially where illegitimate and adopted children are involved.) I'm also seeing people on Ancestry importing this same wrong information to their Ancestry trees. This is really frustrating when you need other trees to be accurate for Ancestry's DNA ThruLines. So, if you're looking for records, definitely use the site. But adding a tree or using the information from FamilySearch's user-submitted trees should be a hard pass. Also, keep in mind, that once you add tree information to their site, you cannot delete it.

Since joining in last August 2019 I've really enjoyed using Familysearch.org and found out so much about my family that they'd have never known. It even let's you print out different sections of your family tree in 3 modes. There's Landscape which prints out information on 4 family generations, Portrait which prints out photographs you've uploaded of 5 family generations and Fan Chart which prints out the names of up to 7 family generations.

This is a nice website to preserve memories. It's nice the way it helps to connect you to people in your tree without having to redo all the work if someone else has already done it. Once I got in a few connecting individuals, someone had done the work for me out five or six generations on several of my lines. My biggest complaint? How can I preserve family memories if I'm told what pictures I can and can't post? While I understand the need for rules, I thought it would be neat to include some of the announcements from big moments in our lives... engagement pictures, baby announcements, etc. However, knowing my pictures were 1000% innocent, I neglected to read the guidelines before posting the memories I wanted to preserve. A very harmless engagement picture of me and my husband "kissing" (we barely touched lips to pose for the photo) and a picture of my newborn baby (who had no clothes on, but neither her bum nor girl parts were showing, only her back) were deemed inappropriate. Mind-boggling! I am an extremely modest person. You see worse in PG movies... Disney cartoons, even! What if it was a beloved 100 year old black and white gem of my great-grandparents kissing? Nope! Not allowed! I have a hard time trusting sites like this with beloved treasures... what if it were the only place I had certain memories stored, only to find they were restricted/removed/etc.? See provocative pictures below.

Well I will say this my whole family tree was ruined by some ignorant person with no actual proof took 12 generations down I even got a little angry and asked why do they allow these things to happen I got so sick and tried of people putting in false information about my grandmother I even filed a complaint and I got told I was acting inappropriately these people are idiots I have found accurate information off the TV show finding my roots look for a private genealogist your better off so much fraudulent records they can fly off I'm done deleted and freed