Tuesday, November 10, 2015

How to Easily Share Sources Between Ancestry and FamilySearch

I recently discovered a super easy way to share sources between Ancestry and FamilySearch.

However, this feature is only available for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who have subscribed to Ancestry using their LDS account.

Before you can share sources, you will need to connect your ancestor in Ancestry to your ancestor in FamilySearch. To do that, while you're on an ancestor's person page in Ancestry.com, click on the FamilySearch icon next to the "Search" button. Sign into FamilySearch if needed, click on the FamilySearch icon again, match your ancestor in the list provided, and then click on "Connect Person."

Now, I'll show you how to easily share sources between Ancestry and FamilySearch.

Click on the FamilySearch icon next to the "Search" button.


Click on "Compare person on FamilySearch" in the drop down menu.


You may see the following prompt to sign into FamilySearch. If so, click "Sign In."


Enter your FamilySearch username and password and click on the "Sign In" button.


Choose the matching person in your FamilySearch Family Tree.


You will then see a side-by-side comparison of the person on FamilySearch and Ancestry. If you are satisfied that they are the same person, click the "Connect Person" button.


You will then see a page that looks similar to this.


Scroll down to the Sources section. As you can see, there is a source attached in Raymunda's person page in FamilySearch (left column) that isn't in Raymunda's person page in Ancestry (right column). And there are three sources attached to her Ancestry person page that aren't in her FamilySearch person page.

To share the FamilySearch source to Ancestry, just click on the gray box next to the source.


And it will automatically appear in the Ancestry column.


Click on the gray boxes next to the sources in the Ancestry column to share them to FamilySearch.



Voila! Now both FamilySearch and Ancestry columns have the same sources for Raymunda.



Press the "Save Changes" button and you're done.



Here's a screenshot showing the FamilySearch source now listed on Raymunda's person page in Ancestry.


You will also see the shared sources from Ancestry to FamilySearch when you go to your ancestor's person page in FamilySearch. If that page is already open, and you don't see the changes, refresh the page and they should appear.




There you go! Pretty easy right?

Thanks for reading!

Jana
 
© 2015 Copyright by Jana Last, All Rights Reserved

5 comments:

  1. This sounds great---is there any way to do it without being an LDS member? I have just been copying the citation and adding it as a source on my Ancestry tree. I don't have a tree on FamilySearch because there's no way to sync it to my Ancestry tree, and I just can't imagine updating each tree manually.

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    1. Hi Amy,

      Unfortunately, there isn't a way to do this without being an LDS member at this time. I asked someone who works at Ancestry.com if this feature would be available for the general public in the future, but she didn't know if it would or not. It would be awesome if the sharing sources feature becomes available for everyone someday. Thanks for stopping by!

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    2. Thanks, Jana! I might consider conversion, but my ancestors would probably kill me! :)

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  2. Jana - Great post. One thought though - If the source is found at FamilySearch - like a US Census - you really should do the sourcing for it in Family Tree at FS instead of bringing over the source from Ancestry. Why? Because if you don't actually use the link at FS it could lead others to think that the persons on the source at FS need to be added to Family Tree. So I would suggest that the moving of sources from Ancestry to FS be limited to the sources found at Ancestry that can't be duplicated at FS.

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    1. Thank you for your comment Bob! You make a great point. I recently was sharing sources on a person page and had census records for the same years in both the Ancestry and FamilySearch columns. I didn't duplicate the sources by sharing them in that case.

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