FamilySearch Archives

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…

Quick & Dirty Family Trees for DNA Matches

Genealogists often build Quick & Dirty family trees (Q&D trees) for DNA matches who don't have linked family trees or for DNA matches whose trees aren't complete enough to help determine the family relationship. I don't have the patience to build a tree for each tree-challenged DNA match, so I use a shortcut.

Disclaimer.

I'm a hobbyist. My husband is a professional in the industry. Professional Genealogists probably consider this a very low-brow method partially because I'm using a public family tree that I didn't personally research and because the FamilySearch tree will have errors. When I research with my husband, he hands me a stack of these papers and tells me, "Document everything, especially failures." This isn't that; it's not original research. That's why the title includes the words "find" and "quick and dirty." I ain't doing the work. To some pros, this method is akin to dum…

How to Export a GEDCOM File from FamilySearch Family Tree

Today I alternated between 😭 and 😡 as I tried to figure out the best way to export my family tree from FamilySearch to Ancestry and MyHeritage, two sites where I have DNA matches and want trees with all my ancestors' descendant lines. This is what I learned. How to Export a GEDCOM File from FamilySearch Family Tree The Short Answer: You can't. FamilySearch doesn't support exporting data as a GEDCOM file. The Better Answer: You can, in a roundabout way. You can Import your way to an Export. The Short Answer - A little background info GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunications and is a standard file structure for genealogical information. It's the most popular file type used to exchange & share family tree information. If you want a copy of someone's family tree, you ask for a GEDCOM file. FamilySearch Family Tree is a "one tree" site where they own the family tree and everyone adds to it and grows the tree. Be…