Thursday, June 14, 2012

Attaching Records to Trees: Ancestry.com and FamilySearch

Attaching records to trees is now a reality for both users of Ancestry.com Member Trees and users of FamilySearch Family Tree. (Unfortunately, access to the Family Tree is not yet available to the general public.)

Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com users have long had the ability to attach records. At its simplest, click on Save and select Attach to the individual. This simple scenario occurs when you start your search in your tree.

Albert Einstein page in an Ancestry Member Tree

Then when you click Save, you can attach directly to the searched-for individual.

Attach a record to an Ancestry Member Tree

FamilySearch

FamilySearch only recently added the ability to attach records to the Family Tree. Attaching is a two step process. First save the record to your Source Box as explained in my last article. Second attach the source to a person. To do this, switch to the target Person page, click Add a New Source, and click the Attach next to the target record.

Attach a record to FamilySearch Family Tree

2 comments:

  1. Good advance for FamilySearch. Now if you could just as easily link a FS record to an Ancestry tree and vice-versa. On a related note, does anyone (hint, hint Ancestry Insider) have any insight into why Ancestry has not fixed their longstanding problem with attaching multiple marriage records to individuals? The workarounds they have suggested are complicated and cumbersome and it just strikes me as unpardonable that this problem has persisted for years now.

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  2. AI, thanks for your rundown on the Family Tree procedure. As for the Ancestry.com widget, what one attaches is not an actual record (be it a document, index or item on another website) but a citation to whatever the object is, as well as a link to Ancestry.com's extract or version of the object. Ancestry.com confuses some users by calling the extract "the record." The Ancestry.com MemberTree owner can never change the URL link to go directly to the object, but can add a URL as a 'web link' separately from the citation entry. The background code for arriving at the actual record is additionally a confusing issue for users of FTM2012, which can take "forever" to download actual document images.

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