Some changes additional have been made to Family Tree recently. We are excited to announce these latest changes and updates because we feel that they make using Family Tree a more enjoyable experience for those who use it. These latest changes include:
- Life sketch.
- Notes.
- Migration of most notes from new.familysearch.org.
- More entries on the change history.
- A wording change to the link used to view a parent-child relationship. (Currently, this change affects only the English versions of Family Tree. When we receive the translations, we’ll update the other languages.)
Life Sketch
You can enter a short biography about a person in a new “Life Sketch” section. Some important facts about the life sketch:
- It appears near the top of a person’s details view.
- You can post up to 10,000 characters (letters and symbols, not 10,000 words). If want to add more than the 10,000 character limit, then you should add the story using the Photos and Stories feature.
- Any short biography that is added using the details view can be added, edited, and deleted by all users, which means the writing can be a collaborative process.
- All changes appear in the change history and can be undone if needed.
View, Add, Edit, Delete, Notes
For a long time, our users have been asking for a notes feature in Family Tree. Notes are free-form, narrative information that simply does not fit anywhere else on a person’s record.
You can now view, add, edit, and delete notes in Family Tree. Some important things to know about this new notes feature:
- You can add notes about an individual ancestor, a couple relationships, and a parent-child relationship.
- You cannot enter notes about a specific piece of information about a person (such as a specific birth, marriage, or death event).
- Each note can contain up to 10,000 characters.
- Notes can be added, edited, and deleted by all users.
- All changes to notes appear in the change history and can be undone if needed.
Here is where you can find the various places to enter notes:
- For a person’s notes, the notes are between the Discussions and the Temple Ordinances sections of the person’s details.
- For a couple relationship, notes appear beneath the sources.
- For a child-parent relationship, notes also appear beneath the sources.
Migration of Notes from new.familysearch.org to Family Tree
FamilySearch has moved most of the notes that were in new.familysearch.org into Family Tree. Please notice the “most” caveat. Not all notes were moved. Exactly which notes were moved is not easy to determine.
The reason for this uncertainty is because in new.familysearch.org, you could add notes in three different places:
- To a person.
- To a specific piece of data about a person (such as a name or birth event).
- To a family relationship. (In new.familysearch.org, these were called both “family notes” and “couple notes,” depending where in the system you were.)
We moved only two of these types of notes:
- Notes about persons.
- Notes about relationships.
We did not move the notes about the specific pieces of data. There are no plans to move the notes that were attached to specific pieces of information from new.familysearch.org to Family Tree.
Change History List is Now Increased to 25 Entries
When you view a change history list, it now contains up to 25 entries per page. Previously, you could see only 10 entries per page.
Wording Change
On a person’s details page, in the section where you see Family Relationships, the wording of the link used to see a parent-child relationship has changed from “View Relationship” to “Edit Parents.”
This change has been made in English and will soon be in the languages that FamilySearch is available in.
