FamilySearch Archives

FamilySearch turns 20!

FamilySearch turns 20 today! This free genealogy website started May 24, 1999 and hosts family history record collections from around the world. Celebrate 20 years of FamilySearch by trying their: free Family Treefree Historical Recordsfree Photo & Memory Gallery & appfree Digitized book collectionfree Family Tree keepsakesfree Family Tree Charts& more from FamilySearch partner apps! If you're new to genealogy, the site is always free but requires that you create an account to access some collections. Some offerings to check out include:

Free Family Tree their unified family tree - you can link yourself to the worldwide Family Tree by connecting to an ancestor who is already in the tree, or just start building your own tree for free on their site free record matching with automated hints to help you build your family tree

Search Search more than 2,000 collections of Historical Records for fr…

How To Export a FamilySearch GEDCOM with RootsMagic

If you want to get a free copy of your FamilySearch family tree to upload to another program or website (Ancestry, MyHeritage, etc) you'll need to use one of FamilySearch's partner programs to get this data. Each of these partners, Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree, and RootsMagic has a free version you can use to export a FamilySearch family tree and create a GEDCOM file, a format universally used for sharing family tree files.

Here's FamilySearch's statement:

"Currently we are not able to export data from Family Tree to a GEDCOM file. Use one of the Family Tree certified programs, i.e. Ancestral Quest, Legacy Family Tree, or RootsMagic to import data from Family Tree into one of the programs and then create a GEDCOM."

First, you'll need to download a free version of RootsMagic.

At rootsmagic.com and in the header menu, select Downloads, then select Trial Vers…

Is Your Tree Well-Sourced? A Free Visual Check Using a Fan Chart

FamilySearch has a Fan Chart display mode you can use as a visual aid to see if your tree has source citations for each person. The tree is color-coded; the darker the color, the more source citations. This is a great tool to help you see which family lines need more research and sourcing.

FamilySearch family trees are community-owned trees that anyone can change. That makes one person's research vulnerable to the human error of all others but can also make for a better-researched tree with multiple contributors.

A Well-Sourced Tree at FamilySearch

This is my husband's family tree. The color key for this chart is:

darkest orange color represents people with 10+ source citationsmedium orange represents 5-9 source citationslight orange represents 1-4 source citationswhite represents 0 (zero) source citations

As you can see from his tree, most of his tree is well-sourc…