As you delve deeper into your family history research, you may come across valuable
sources of information that are not readily available on FamilySearch. In such cases,
it's important to know how to add these sources to your Family Tree on FamilySearch,
which is everybody's family's free for a comprehensive and accurate record.
In this video, I will show you how to add an outside source to
the FamilySearch Family Tree if you're using the web browser. If you're going
to be using the mobile app, I'll leave a link to some instructions in the description box.
To begin, you must be logged into your FamilySearch account. If you don't have
an account already, now's the time to get one because you can easily create an account for free.
Now, once you've signed in, navigate to the person page of the individual for whom you have
an outside source. In this case, I'm going to go to my recent person down here below,
or I could come and use the FamilySearch Family Tree to navigate to that profile. But
since I've used him recently, I'm going to come down here, click on his name,
and now I'm going to be at the profile for William Talbot Peak.
Now, this page displays detailed information about William, but I want to add a source, so I
need to click on the Source tab. And notice I have already started adding quite a few sources to him,
but I want to add something new. So I'm going to click on "Add Source," click on "Add New Source."
A dialog box will appear where you can enter the information about the outside source you
wish to add. First, we want to talk about a date. But before you can know what date it is,
I need to show you what source I'm going to use.
I found an article where in the middle section that begins at the meeting of the council last
night, Mayor Nagel presided over the newly elected members. And if we come down here,
we're going to see that William Peak and W.E. Hogness were elected Knight patrolmen.
Now, this actually comes from Newspaper Archives, which you can access for free
at FamilySearch centers. And so, it's over on Newspaper Archives, and it came out of
the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune in 1897. Okay, so the date is actually December 17,
1897. I'm going to navigate back to this create a source, and I'm going to add a date.
Now, you don't necessarily need to put in December 17th, but I went ahead and
did it anyway. What's going to happen is when I'm finished adding the source,
this source will be filtered by date in this source list, which I absolutely love.
So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to give this a title. Let's go back to
the source. So should we call it Bellevue? What should we call it? This is for your purposes
only. So what are you going to remember that the source is for, who is it about? And in this case,
I'm going to say that William Peak was elected a night patrolman. So go back here,
and I'm going to do the name. Actually, I'm going to do a year because I kind of like
having titles of sources with years. 1897. Alright, so now I have a title.
Now I could actually use title format where you capitalize all the major words. That's a
personal preference of yours. It's not required, but it's for your purpose, so do what you will.
Next, we're going to have either a web URL if it is a digital source,
or maybe we can add it from a memory. We'll talk about that in a little bit.
If you don't have a web URL, you can't really add anything. So in this case,
I don't have the URL for the Newspaper Archives. I forgot to say that. Oops.
Okay, so where is the record found? This is the time to add the citation information.
This helps other researchers verify and locate the source. But as you can see,
FamilySearch doesn't get us a citation template. You'll need to access citation formats from tools
like RootsMagic citation templates, Family Tree Maker templates, or that cool new tool that I
told you about, Site Builder. So you need to go ahead and grab some type of source citation.
Now, the briefest citation that I have is something that looks like this. It's not great,
but at least at the start, which shows you why it's important to grab a source citation template.
But if I need to, I can actually get back to this article. I know it's in the Cincinnati Commercial
Tribune. I'm going to add a comma. Newspaper Archives is the website. If I find the issue,
that's December 17, 1897, page five, then I should be able to find that
article under the headline "Bellevue." So yes, we added a source citation. Yes,
it's not going to hold up in genealogy standards, but it is something to be aware of.
So the next thing we do is we come down to Notes. Notes is the section in which
you provide a transcription of the source or an explanation of the item. This description will
offer additional context and insights for future reference. If you need to add some analysis,
you can add that here. If you need to tell other researchers why it applies to your ancestor,
even though it doesn't seem obvious, that's why you might want to put it here.
In this case, all I'm really going to say is kind of a repeat
of this. This is William Peake elected night patrolman. Cincinnati City Council
meeting newspaper article briefly mentions him. Okay, there you go.
Now, the reason to attach this source, I highly recommend that you don't skip this
box. It's essential to explain why you attach a source to an individual. This
reason could be anything from validating a specific event or relationship to providing
further evidence for a particular claim. So do not skip this box.
Now, I'm off my soapbox. And why am I attaching this? Well, I know that
now. For those of you who are wondering why I have this little red number and this little box,
you're not going to have that from FamilySearch. That is an add-in that
I have from Grammarly. But I have written this reason statement. Reason to attach:
I know that William is a patrolman living in Kentucky. And you can pause the video and read
the rest of this information. We are going to talk about tags in another video. But for now,
I do know it identifies his name. It doesn't talk about anything else. I'm not going to add
this to my source box because it only applies to William. However, if this particular source
referenced multiple people, I would want to check that box because then I can go into
the source box and bring that into someone else if they were so named in that article.
Once I'm all finished, I can click "Save." And then I look for 1897, and there it is.
Notice it is a world icon, and it says the title I gave it. Remember, it's just for me,
others will be able to see, "William Peak elected Knight patrolman." Now, that's kind of cool.
So, what's the source? I come down here, I have the source date,
where the record is found, and then the description and any additional
information I had. If I had included a link, it will show up here as well.
What happens if you have a digital version of your source? Maybe you have a photo or
a newspaper clipping or a scan of a personal history, and you want to include that? Well,
you have two options. One, you can upload that item to the memory section,
and I've described how to do that in another video. And here's that article,
it's uploaded right there. Or you can add the memory to the source from the source page.
But here, I'm going to come down to this entry 3, and I'm going to hit "Edit." And then I'm going to
click on "Add Memory" and select from Gallery. After it loads, I'm going to look for "1897
William elected Knight patrolman." Click on that, and now the photo is connected with the source.
Unfortunately, my recent change went away. Something I don't like about FamilySearch because
I would like to have been able to keep that original reason statement. So what can I do? Well,
I'm going to click "Cancel" for now. I'm going to highlight and copy this to my clipboard. And I'm
going to repeat the process: Edit, Add Memory, select from Gallery, "1897," click my image,
reason statement, I haven't changed it, and click "Save." And so now if someone else comes in here,
they're going to see that, "Hey, wait, there's an image. It's not just a citation
from somewhere in the world. It's an image." So you click on there, and then you're going
to go ahead and see that clipping, and I have all that information right in there.
So there you have it. That's how you can corral all of your source citations in one location on
FamilySearch. Unfortunately, you have to either look up citations in Evidence Explained or other
various style guides for how to format your citation. If you write one reason statement,
it's going to be overwritten unless you copy it to be used in the second. So there are some drawbacks
that make it kind of wonky. However, I hope that explains everything for you. If I did a good job,
click the like button and leave a comment and let me know what other questions you have on
how to utilize FamilySearch better. And then on your way out, how about you go watch another
video? Check out these videos on how to use the FamilySearch website more effectively.