Recovering Access to a FamilySearch Account

 

Recovering Access to a FamilySearch Account
As consultants, a frequent task is helping someone who cannot get into their FamilySearch account.
This usually means that they have forgotten their username or password or both.
The solution begins by clicking Sign In, then Forgot username or password, then select Email or Mobile Number and click OK and follow the steps. Then ask them to write their username and password and put it in their wallet.

See: How Do I Recover My FamilySearch Username and Password (about 2 minutes long)
https://youtu.be/4KHxXU4DEWk

What if both the email and mobile number have been changed?
Remember that we can call the toll-free FamilySearch Support number for help.
1-866-406-1830

(As a last resort, I might suggest trying the Sign Up option, in the hope that the system will find an existing account based on the same name and address. But I would try the other options first.)

What are the rules for usernames and passwords?
https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/what-are-the-rules-for-my-username-and-password

Impossible Merges Made Simple in Family Tree

Often merges are impossible because one record shows that the person is living and the other shows them as deceased. 

If both records really are for the same person, correct the record that is wrong, and you can merge them without difficulty. 

To Merge By ID: copy the ID of one duplicate, then go to the Person Page of the other duplicate and click Merge By ID and paste or input the ID from the first duplicate.

Researching our Recent Ancestors

Researching our Recent Ancestors (despite the privacy restrictions on public records)

This topic is especially important for recent converts and others who are just getting started in family history. I went through this process myself. I interviewed my parents, surviving grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins and beyond. I recorded the information and added it to FamilySearch and its predecessors. I am glad that I did!

Some of us come from places where historical records are readily available. Others do not. But if most of us are looking for information about our parents and grandparents, we will be blocked by privacy laws, designed to protect living people. Even if the people we are researching are deceased, their information may be in the time period that is blocked, typically the most recent 100 years.

RESOURCES
Recently I found an excellent podcast from Lisa Louise Cooke, (one of my favorite family history podcasters). She has lots of helpful suggestions.

Why Dad Becomes the Forgotten Ancestor https://lisalouisecooke.com/2026/06/16/fathers/

Another site listed these resources for recent ancestors:
1931 and 1926 Canada censuses
Passenger Lists & Border Crossings
WWI Personnel Files
Newspapers
Vital Records    [Occasionally, but this is where we tend to run into the privacy barrier.]
Gravestones & Memorials    [Findagrave is wonderful, as are some other cemetery databases.]

[Definitely add Local History Books to the list, if you are researching in Canada.]

INTERVIEWING RELATIVES 
As a new convert, I went through the process of interviewing close and distant relatives. Most were glad to help. 

My usual approach was "Hi, I am Bill Buchanan and I am trying to build a family tree for my family.
I wonder if you would be willing to help me?" 

I made no reference to the Church because I knew some relatives would find that a distraction.

Lists of interview questions can be found on various sites online. This is one of them.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/img_auth.php/4/4a/Interview_Questions.pdf
You can edit the list of questions to meet your needs and interests.

(I kept a few blank family group records handy, for recording the information and especially the relationships.)

CHARTS
Family Group Records and Pedigree charts simplify the process of adding what you learn to the FamilySearch Family Tree. I find the Person Details screen the easiest place to add information to the right person in Family Tree. (As a newbie, I accidentally switched my grandparents' own parents, so I know how easy it is to make such mistakes and how to correct them.)

I prefer a 1-page Family Group Record such as 

https://www.cs.williams.edu/~bailey/genealogy/index_files/FamilyRecordSheet.pdf

But a 2-paage version printed on both sides of the same paper can hold even more information, such as 

https://www.archives.gov/files/research/genealogy/charts-forms/family-group-sheet.pdf

If you are dealing with several generations of the family, a few Pedigree/Ancestral charts will make it easier to keep things organized. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/img_auth.php/e/ed/Pedigree_Chart_no_ordinances.pdf

I wish you success and special experiences as you spend time learning about your family.

- Bill Buchanan

Ordinances of a Deceased Person Are Hidden. Why???

Recently a friend asked how he could see the ordinances of his uncle who passed away two years ago.  I explained that Membership Department probably thinks he is still alive. I suggested that he ask his ward clerk to request the membership record and then record the death. Then Membership Department will make his record visible on FamilySearch and his ordinances will be shown.

This reminded me of my European friends wanting to be sealed to their parents last year. So I checked their mother's record. Her live and proxy ordinances are now visible, including sealing to her husband. 

The sealings of the living children are not shown in order to protect their own privacy.

But I am confident they happened. Bravo!

[NOTE: Ordinances of deceased excommunicated people become visible when their blessings have been restored.]

The power of a shared family tree

I attended the May 30th Single Adults Family History Activity hosted by the Edmonton North Stake and Spruce Grove Stake. My role was to help participants with their family history. I experienced something that seems miraculous to me. 

One of the participants asked for help with his family tree. He had been using Ordinances Ready to print temple cards, but he wanted to do ordinances for his own family. 

When he signed into FamilySearch, I noticed that his tree consisted of 4 people: him, his mother, his estranged father and his father's mother. That was not much to go on, when public records of the most recent 100 years are unavailable to protect the privacy of living people. How could we bridge that 100-year gap?

We needed a few miracles. I asked if his parents could provide any additional information.  He agreed to phone his mother, and she was able to provide the information on her own parents and grandparents, and the names of his father's parents. These were the clues we needed to move forward. Google searches found obituaries and other helps. Each obituary provided birth and death information and identified the deceased person's parents and siblings. One clue led to another. With lots of heavenly help, in less than 3 hours, his 7-generation fan chart looked as complete as mine. For comparison, I have been working on mine for over 60 years!

There is absolutely no guarantee of this kind of success. The person I was helping had relatives on both sides of his family, who had previously added family members to Family Tree. We just needed to find them and connect him to them. This is part of the power of FamilySearch, where everyone is working on a shared family tree, instead of thousands of tiny separate family trees. Often, if you can add a few generations to Family Tree, it will connect to research that goes back much further.

I have a testimony of the power of family history and temple work to bless the living and the dead. The miracles continue and I want to be part of them. The Savior invites us to help in his work of bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. 

- Bill Buchanan, Spruce Grove Stake Consultant

BILL'S QUICK GUIDE FOR FAMILYSEARCH MEMORIES

 BILL'S QUICK GUIDE FOR FAMILYSEARCH MEMORIES

Adding Memories - The Choices Are: 
Add Photo or Document (upload files)
Write a Story (write in plain text - maybe 10 minutes worth) Longer items should be written in a word processor and saved/exported as PDF and then uploaded. This is especially true of multi-page documents.
Add an Audio (create or upload)

Once items have been uploaded they are safely stored for the future. 

Some Limits:

• Maximum of 1000 Memories per profile/Person Page
• Public Memories should not identify living people. 
• Maximum size of any one Memories item is 15 MB.
• Only non-proprietary file formats are supported, so if one format is not accepted try another format.
• If you have trouble uploading photos try one of these file formats PNG, PDF/A, JPG or JPEG or JPEG 2000.
• Images that may be rejected: violence, advertising, nudity, kissing. (If automatic screening fails, ask why the photo is rejected.)
• Videos cannot be uploaded.

Suggestions:

• PDF is the best format for multi-page text items. e,g, books and other word processor documents
• Multi-page PDF files do not work well for page images, where each page is actually a huge photo. (15 MB limit)
• If scanning images, use a minimum of 300 dpi (300 pixels per inch) to preserve a good image quality.
• The easiest way to create and upload audio files is from your phone using the Memories mobile app.
• Audio files are usually limited to about 5 minutes in length to fit in the 15 MB limit.
• (With considerable tinkering in the free Audacity software I have been able to compress 30 minutes into 15 MB.) 
• All Memories should be tagged to people in the Family Tree. Otherwise people may not find them.
• Items in Memories can be added to Albums that you create in FamilySearch. Albums can be accessed by anyone who has the Album's link even without a FamilySearch account, so it is an easy way to share Memories.
• You can instantly colorize black and white photos or repair faded color photos if you have a free account at https://www.myheritage.com/incolor

This is not an exhaustive list, but is based on my experience personally uploading thousands of Memories and as a missionary supporting Memories in FamilySearch Support in 2015-2020.

Meeting with the missionaries?

 I am glad that you are considering meeting with the missionaries.
To arrange a visit by the missionaries, you can use the church website.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/ps/meet-with-missionaries
This site also has answers to some of the questions you may have.
The missionaries and local church leaders and teachers serve at their own expense.

This was an important point to me when I first came in contact with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 

I had been attending a different church in the small town where I grew up. At a friend's home, the young minister told us that he was planning to leave the ministry because he was required to teach things he did not believe, This really troubled me. If ministers were teaching things they did not believe, in order to receive a salary from their church, how could I believe what they said?

I had greater trust in the missionaries and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because they were NOT paid by their church. I recognized that they could be mistaken in their beliefs, but they were teaching what they honestly believed.

And they asked me to pray to God to know the truth for myself, just like Joseph Smith had done. I did, and received the impression that this was where God wanted me to be. This decision has enriched my life in so many ways.

Another point of concern with my previous church, was the teaching that heaven was only accessible to those who believed in Jesus Christ. I estimated that in ancient Biblical times, probably less than 1% of the world's population ever heard of Jesus Christ. So a loving God had set up a system where 99% of his children would automatically fail? That made no sense to me!

The missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told me that the Bible had the answer. In 1 Peter chapters 3-4, the apostle Peter teaches us that while Christ's dead body lay in the tomb, his spirit taught the spirits of the dead, so that they could have faith in him, repent of the bad things they had done, and choose to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and inherit eternal life, just like the living people.

A loving God had set up a system where ALL of his children could enjoy the blessings of heaven! Wow! I don't remember my previous church ever teaching this!
And the missionaries taught that there are three heavens, not just one. Interesting.

These were answers that made a difference to me.

If you have questions for the missionaries, that is a good thing.

May the Lord bless you. 

You are in my prayers,

Bill

Standardizing Place Names

I sent this message today. How does your experience compare with mine?

Dear FamilySearch Support.

Standardizing place names has always been a quagmire, but I think it can be improved if we get the engineers involved.

If I remember correctly, when I served in FamilySearch Support, the instructions were to choose the standard place name closest to the actual place. If the local place is not identified, choose the most specific level that is identified. 

If the place for the event is not identified, use "of" + some place the individual lived. And use "about" + the approximate time the event would have occurred. This enables us to fix the individual in time and space, facilitating further research, and helping the system to find historical records as sources.

Lately I see a tendency to sacrifice the accuracy of such estimates in favor of unwarranted precision. In a recent Youtube video people are saying "Remove the 'of's and 'about's, FamilySearch does not want them." If that is the case, then estimates are no longer properly identified as estimates, and confusion results. Genealogy is not always like physical sciences, where facts can be measured with high precision. e.g. Prior to the 1900s people were typically born at home on the farm, and not in town.

An obstacle to standardizing place names is that there may be different standard place names for the same place over time, and in the mobile app it is usually impossible to know which of the 10 standard names is correct at the time the event occurred. Can't we simplify this? If that locality was called by the same name across the centuries, why worry about what the local government was? i.e. focus on geography rather than politics

And coordinate the automatic matching with the places listed in the "Other Events", so that priority can be given to getting the Country correct, rather than the current situation, where priority is given to matching the Locality, even if the "matching locality" is thousands of miles away from the real place.  

In my personal experience, I found that many of my ancestors were standardized as living in the tiny Scotland district on the island of St Helena rather than in the actual country of Scotland, due to a flaw in the computer algorithm. Ask anyone doing research in Ukraine how often "Galicia, Austria" gets standardized as "Galicia, Spain". Match on the largest jurisdictions, not the smallest, and such errors will tend to disappear.

Please forward this message to Todd or someone who will understand the finer points.

Let's see if we can get the "matching" algorithm fixed.

Thank you,

Bill Buchanan

My blog: http://billbuchanan.blogspot.com
My FamilySearch blog https://billsfamilyhistorycenter.blogspot.com/

Family History Has Changed Over Time

Today, research is secondary to strengthening our personal relationship with Jesus Christ, including through worship and covenants in the temple. As a new convert in 1962, I was placed in the genealogy class in Sunday School. It was heavily focused on research, and we felt guilty if we failed to discover a direct ancestor that no one had discovered before. I learned to love research and I still do. Guilt is no longer my motivation.

I am glad that today all members are not expected to become dedicated researchers, but that all can enjoy the spiritual aspects of service in the house of the Lord. I hope you will continue to add what you know to the family tree, and that those of you who love a good puzzle will enjoy learning to research your ancestors. The resources keep getting better all the time. And your ward temple and family history consultants will be thrilled to help you, if you ask. And your stake consultants love to help too. I have had wonderful experiences while helping others.

And with 98% of new accounts in FamilySearch being by non-members, some of them may incidentally do research on your part of the shared family tree.

These changes are testimonies to me that the Lord loves us deeply and personally, whether we are living or dead; and He is hastening his work of redemption. He invites us to help.

Hidden Records in Family Tree

 

Hidden Records in Family Tree
In Family Tree, records of living people are hidden from everyone except the person who created them. 
And the record of live ordinances of living members is visible only on the record created by Membership Department, and hidden from everyone else. Today I was contacted by a friend from Béziers, France asking the ordinance dates of his deceased mother. He and his sister want to be sealed to their parents, but their mother's completed ordinances are not shown on her record that is public.

What is the problem and what is the solution?
The problem is that Membership Department thinks she is still alive, and is protecting her privacy.
The solution is to get her death recorded. The easiest way may be to have my friend's branch president request her membership and record her death. Then the private record will become public.

[I hope this information is helpful. - Bill]