the FamilySearch mobile app has a lot of cool features that you need to be
using and today we're going to give you an overview coming up next
howdy I'm Devon Noel Lee with Family History Fanatics and we want to dive
into the FamilySearch mobile app and some of the cool features did you
definitely want to check out so let me get out my phone now the one you're
gonna see is a mobile device and there are a few minor differences between the
Android platform and Apple to see some more of the distinctions I'll make sure
I drop a link in the description to the RootsTech review of the cool features
that you're going to see but many of the features will be very similar let me
tell you all about them so we are on the mobile device and when we go there will
be dots but we have right there those three dots at the top and I am gonna go
actually to settings first when I click on settings I am gonna get the fan
chart on my phone many of you know at Family History Fanatics I loved an
charts, in fact, the FamilySearch folks gave me a fan charts shirt I really love
them so now we're in the fan chart we can zoom in and see the fan that we're
looking at our central person there in the middle and then a couple of rings of
ancestors and then children if you click on those bars you can go from the left
to right but let's say you want to switch and make Emma Virginia Townsend
the central person then it it is it really easy but I'll show you how to
switch to see her fan chart so what you have to do let's go back you have to
click on the person's name you want to switch to the central person and then
you want to go and go to the icons that are up at the top right and then go to
view this tree and now now we're looking at Emma Virginia Townsend
tree so that's how you navigate on a fan chart now one of the things that I like
to do here is to look at map my ancestors it's a new cool feature that's
here on FamilySearch so with Map My Ancestors, I can see where my ancestors
are around the globe I had some that were from the English area I have one
over here in Turkey have no idea who that is if I click on that it tells me
death 'of Maryland' that means it's not an actual place it means
there's something I need to go and fix so if you see something a little unusual
then you have to go to your tree to fix it so I'm going to go back and then I
can come over here and I can see where people are located
so I can see that I have and some of my ancestors
Ithamer Comfort and he's from Canada Canada and so really he should be over
here in the map that North American part but Canada was part of England and so
that makes sense as to why some of the dots are over there and then I can also
see back I have my William Anderson who is from Sweden and uh you have this
part back there and I could go back and you just really have some fun seeing
where everybody is located so I've eight down here in this Baden area they've
got em - over here and those are the Bayern Obermeiassu and
then you've got this is the Shafleys that looks good over in Switzerland so
it's really fun to go around and see where your ancestors are
on a map so play with that a little bit if you have tell me what you think are
you really enjoying it because I know I am so if you're loving the map feature
of say "love map feature" in the comment section another really cool thing that I
like to see here that it's new to FamilySearch this came out just recently and
that is "My Contributions" so I like to see how much I have done on the Family
Search family tree so in [2012] Family Search, familysearch.org, and the "One "Tree
concept came into existence and you can see I went hog-wild making contributions
to the tree and then I kind of declined since then and there was a lot to clean
up there were a lot of sources that I was putting in and you can see that I've
added over 16,000 sources I'm really excited about that and so far a little
bit in 2020 um don't get disappointed in your statistics because why was it
so much so long ago because there I was finding so many discoveries I didn't
have a YouTube channel there's a lot of reasons why there was so much that I did
at the beginning and there's so few now just look at how much you've been able
to contribute and memories these are photos documents stories and audio
clippings I really have enjoyed doing that and then the number of people that
I have created on the FamilySearch family tree if I want to look at the
changes I've done then here's a list of the people I've been working on lately
and then I'm not gonna show private persons that's for you to explore later
alright so another thing you could do is family history activities in-home
activities all about me this is where you can do "Compare A Face" this is always
kind of fun so you're gonna click on compare a face and this is actually
gonna take you out to the website you'll have to sign in again so we're
gonna discover who I got my good looks from
so here's a previous photo but I'm gonna take a new one right here take a photo
practice the doing a good selfie and let's see who FamilySearch thinks I look
like well there you have it I look like my third great-grandfather
Heinrich Zumstein who left Bayern, Germany and moved to Ontario, Canada um I
also like to think that I look like my dad and they think I look like him about
50% now try it with us with glasses on and glasses off it might be hard to take
a picture of yourself with no glasses on if you're almost blind like me but and
here's awesome my grandmother a lot of people I say like look I look like that
with grandmother and then my mother and then my other grandmother so that's kind
of fun to see what your percentages might be so that's one cool thing
but it's not on the FamilySearch app that you can access it from there so
since a lot of these and activities are actually going to be over on the Family
Search website I'm gonna play around a few more cool features I want you to
know about "Messages' did you know that you can contact other users on family
search well we're gonna click on messages and you're gonna be able to see
some of the people who have contacted you and what they've been able
to contact you about and what a little hint and I want to give you if you are
using the message system then be sure to include as much detail about your
research as possible I recently had somebody contact me about Vincenzo
Bucci well I'm not entirely sure how they contacted me through the app
and that they didn't include the personal ID number when you use the app
and you're on a particular person then you can send a message and I'll show you
that in a second if you don't use the app in that way then tell somebody is
some additional identifying of information like the birth date the
location their friend give a little bit of extra detail so people don't go um
maybe I worked on them I'm not entirely sure so let's go and see how you can
send messages on the actress and buddy who's researching so let's say that you
while you were using the FamilySearch app you came across somebody who was
making changes on your tree so let me come down after my recent changes I made
a lot so here's a at something that was connected dawn twine egg
she made a change to the family tree and a couple of things I can do is
it looks like she's my tenth cousin and I can click view relationship and it
will show me oh my gosh look straight up the Marvin lines and down the Marvin
line that's pretty cool okay so that's how she's related to me so remember to
be nice to your cousins y'all okay so I can click on her and I can send a
message and this is what you want to use when you're sending messages to other
people right there at the top it says about Elizabeth Ann Culp and it has the
address and it will actually extend as a PID the personal identification number
so you can then go ahead and type you know type your message and then when you
hit the little send button which I'm not gonna use I actually want to send her a
good message and you can then send that message within the app and then they
will know who you're talking about because the about line will tell you
exactly who we were referencing so be sure to use the message assistant app to
talk to people and find out who your relatives are
what if I don't think when
you are looking at one of your ancestors there are a couple of screens that I
want you to get familiar with they're very similar to the FamilySearch
website but they're slightly different here and then in a future video I'm
going to tell you how to research using the mobile app
a little bit different some things I actually like better so let's go ahead
and give you a quick overview of the screens you're looking at so the first
one is details and that's gonna be the vital information any additional facts
that you've added such as I added that he was a professor and when you click on
those additional information look it gives you a map so you can see where
things are taking place kind of fun and then you can have notes and a life
sketch and the life sketch you can put anything in here that you want in the
life sketch edit life sketch and says professor so I was able to go ahead and
add a few more details about my ancestor in this life sketch and what's really
great is you're trying to give a little bit of detail so people know that when
they go to Robert Victor that he was 5'8" you know
just fun little facts you might want to use to help distinguish your ancestors
fun if you have longer stories go, ahead and put that in the stories section of
the memories but go and I often use this to help differentiate people with the
same name put some identifying pieces of information and that way myself and
other researchers can know a little bit about him so the next screen is going to
be spouses if your ancestor had multiple spouses they'll be listed here with the
marriage date and the children information if you ever need to add
another child you can do it from this screen add in the information and you'll
be able to click Save remember FamilySearch will always look just see if that
profile is already in the family tree because we're all working on the same
tree and you can do the same thing with an add a spouse below click on parents
and there you have two parents their marriage information and siblings you
can add additional siblings and you can add additional parents both sources
nothing in genealogy should be believed unless you have a source to back it up
so here we have a list of the sources that we have found or other
searchers have found for Robert and we can click on those and we can explore
the information here's an index to that information and then you can also view
the image from your screen now depending on where you are the load time is gonna
take a while these are large files so be mindful of that when you're trying to
use your data but you can zoom in I'm using my to zoom in and move around and
access that document memories visits your memory section and from here you
can't go ahead and add memories you can add a photo without add having to go to
the Memories app so go ahead and give that a try and then there's charts now
if you click on these charts it doesn't take you back to that tree view or the
photo tree view these actually download charts to your devices so if you want to
print from your device to a printer you can do that just want to keep you aware
because I keep trying to go back to the fan chart from here and it doesn't work
so don't make the mistake I did so that's about all the things I want to
give you an overview of when you're using the family search mobile app if
you have any questions be sure to check the comments section and let me know
what questions you have and if there's any feature that you absolutely love I
want you to go ahead and put it there as a reminder this is Family History
Fanatics, where we help you understand your DNA, climb your family tree, and
write your ancestors stories along the way be sure to check out the top
playlist for more videos about how to use FamilySearch and the bottom video
link for our newest release