Family SearchReviews 59

Not sure about anyone else but here's why I gave FS 1 star. This is from an old email I found recently.

Firstly, LDS tries to portray itself as the modern day pious scribes toiling in the catacombs of history all in a selfless effort to keep accurate records... THAT is complete BS. They did have the best bastion of information and I will gladly give them kudos for that.
But oh man these people didn't just ". Drop the veil..." they dropped it after they used it for a tissue, tripped over it and curb-stomped it to hell... they have just completely blown it! Whoever came up with this genius plan should be let go and fined for having no idea what they were doing messing around in this website. This used to be a user-friendly, relaxing, delightful website full of easy to retrieve and store family history info. Now, it is a "re-designed" "improved" "prettier?" nightmare of aggravation and tail-chasing.
Well hey! Now they are just like Ancestry.com and every cheap, ineffective website like them. Ancestry.com, the original, jerk-you-around-for-hours until you are utterly frustrated and feeling, well, completely jerked around having accomplished nothing except many many many many many profitable clicks for the company and you are left with nothing.
I called FamilySearch.com and the nice person wanted to hold my hand to help me "clear your cookies"... puhleeeese don't patronize me. You have destroyed the best global genealogy site which used to be good for an afternoon of family enjoyment and a useful, efficient tool for genealogists and turned it into an incredibly annoying waste of time.
They have actually lost information and they have messed up the ability to upload saved information (that you spent precious time finding and saving). You put in date parameters and "exact spellings" only to have zillions of dates completely out of the range you put in and unbelieveable misspellings and inaccurate information! It is positively unbelieveable. Even the error messages are ridiculous and make no sense: "We can't upload your file because we can only handle twice the size of your file"... quite literally the message---want to leave feedback? Well it says, "Looks like your new here... sign up or login to leave feedback..." Um, I am logged it but since they have a new format, maybe I should try to sign up. Nope. When you hit "Sign up" or "Login", you get a big, goofy, annoying "Whoops! We cannot auto-connect because...". Seriously, this has to go down as the biggest, self-inflicted snafu in website history. Things were just going too perfectly for too many years... can't have THAT!
Now, let's see if they can admit this is a collossal disaster and revert to the former recipe for success or will they insist that everyone LOVES it and continue laboring under the delusion that everything is swell when in reality, not only have they made a GRAVE ERROR in judgement but whoever is responsible for this was in no way qualified to alter one thing as evidenced by the end product. What a SHAME.

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

There is no other way to say it. LDS has rendered its family search site effectively useless with its new format. I used it with no trouble for a year before they "updated," meaning, created dead ends, links that don't work, columns that are hard to read., etc. If you tried to imagine a worse outcome, you would probably not be able. I would give it zero stars if I could.

As of this date, November 13,2021, I'm new to genealogy research with online sites. I have only paid for one subscription service [GenealogyBank] that was a disappointment. I've been using the free site FamilySearch for about six months now, finding it an interesting way to spend the time during the pandemic lockdown. Right away I found mistakes in my own family tree, that were made by people who had been careless about "attaching" records to my own grandparents. They were obviously wrong, as I could tell from my own personal knowledge. I corrected them and then took up the mission of making as much of the publicly available (free) information on my ancestors correct and comprehensive.
It soon became obvious to me that certain editors on FamilySearch were interested more in volume than in accuracy. They weren't necessarily "malicious," just careless. FamilySearch does have a way to report "malicious" actors, but most mistakes I've found don't seem to be of this category.
Another annoying feature is that people can supply "evidence" in support of their ancestors to FamilySearch that is hidden behind a paywall from a paid site like Ancestry.com. If one doesn't have a paid subscription to Ancestry.com, one can't verify or challenge the supposed "documentation."
I am looking for someone who has done research on the FamilySearch site to come up with ways to verify source accuracy.

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.

Before you begin with FamilySearch.org please first understand that it is a COLLABORATIVE website. Aside from living relatives, EVERYTHING else is shared and subject to communal editing. When I read through the critical or negative reviews I came to the conclusion that they were written by people who do not really get what a collaborative website looks like. There is no "your" tree! There's only one single, communal tree. It is very similar to WikiTree and in many respects both websites have a similar mandate and a similar philosophy.

Now, for a review of the site itself.

The interface is simple yet remarkably powerful. It has a wealth of well-chosen data sources--in some cases missing from the commercial paywall sites. And, the search algorithms, once you figure them out, are also extraordinarily powerful. Depending on the part of the world you're researching FamilySearch may be the perfect research choice--for Dutch genealogy, for example, I can't see a better website.

I've been using it for four months now and I have not found any software or any website that is anywhere near as powerful as FamilySearch when it comes to building a family tree. If FamilySearch.org were to be spun off as a privately controlled family tree website it would bankrupt MyHeritage and maybe Ancestry--the interface is second to none and it's trivially easy to document your work. But, a lot of people don't like its collaborative nature.

Much of my work happens in the Netherlands and the coverage of records is stunning.

In the right parts of the Netherlands and with a bit of luck, it's possible to use FamilySearch.org to create a properly sourced, RELIABLE tree for an individual dating back five to six generations with only a few hours of work. YES, six generations in a few hours of work! Because I'm working on DNA matches with Dutch relatives I've now created full ancestral trees to prove a connection--and more than a few times I've managed to replicate an entire tree in an hour that almost always matches the family tree that the match had for their ancestors (sometimes mine are more complete, thanks to the search algorithms for FamilySearch.org).

As for conflicts with others--I've only run into two individuals who have conflicting views to mine. In one case it related to a differential interpretation of the facts, and I think our amicable solution (to document the different and equally valid interpretations of the documentary record) was satisfactory. In another it was someone who took "ownership" over an ancestral branch that lacked documentation. Since it was an undocumented branch I left their fantasy alone--genealogy without documentation is fantasy and should be ignored unless it interferes with the proper functioning of a site.

That said, in a few cases I've had auDNA hints that suggest that some ancient connections (early 1700's or even late 1600's) may indeed be correct. I'm not prepared to accept those connections as valid without a lot more research but it's indeed quite interesting.

The one thing I've always wondered about is the affiliation with a church. So far I've not seen indications that's a problem. What I'd be more worried about is that it's a website hosted in the US and the US has extraordinarily weak privacy laws.

PS It's too funny. This is only "second" review at this website. It seems that I reviewed FamilySearch in December as well. I can't see what I said the first time around but this one is now informed by many more months of experience.

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.

This may sound overly dramatic, but genealogy is my main hobby. I have spent (wasted) hundreds of hours entering things in FamilySearch. Did you know that when you attach documents or photographs, they become the property of FamilySearch? My mother's high school graduation photo now belongs to FamilySearch. They monitor your activities and LDS "volunteers" track you and "format" what you do, which means removing accurate information, including documents, because they have already "sealed" a person and they don't want any contradictory information showing up. Many of their "volunteers" (I'm referring to people working at the direction of FamilySearch, not everyday users) do not know the difference between towns and states, and interchange them. They also merge people because they have the same FIRST name. They do not know common nicknames. (I could go on and on.) Many of the LDS users are very rude and send you messages that a part of the "shared family tree" belongs to them and you cannot enter things--even when you have provable verification. This harassment is not only allowed, but reinforced by FamilySearch. They are constantly changing the "shared family tree" in accordance with "projects" they have going on, for example: I have 0% Native American DNA in my DNA tests, but in the last few months I have been given over 50 Native American ancestors in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many of my ancestors who came from Europe, with their names on ship passenger lists, and a continuous line of documentation after arriving in America, have "disappeared." There are several LDS members who send me harassing emails on a regular basis, even thought I have not worked on their part of the "shared tree" for over a year. FamilySearch has no sense of accuracy or reality, they are using you to do their work for them, then changing it to be they way they want it to fir their view of reality. Overnight, huge chunks of your family tree may disappear, but nothing shows up in the change log--they are just gone. If you call the help desk, the first question you are asked is about your religion. By the way, some of the glowing reviews here are written by FamilySearch staff--I recognize their grammatical errors and vocabulary. By all means use their collection of sources, but don't spend time actually constructing your family tree. Also be aware that many of the record "transcriptions" have no corresponding original record--they have been created to match information that has already been attached to someone. Don't invest any time building anything on this site, and double-check all records that you find!

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.

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.

FamilySearch.org is a great site. Always include as much information as it prevents mistakes from creeping in. The solutions gallery can make this interesting for the younger family members with games, ideas, and chart options.

FamilySearch is a fraud and should never be able to practice their crap. I only put in my name and my dads and wallah, my whole family tree was filled in right back to Adam and Eve within a day... bull$#*!! I have asked for my account to be deleted and still there and no response from them other than ask for my email to confirm deletion which I gave them, but they already had on the form I filled out for deletion. Steer clear of this site as it is total bull$#*!! I only gave it one star because I had no choice not to give any.