How to Use FamilySearch: A Beginner’s Guide

If you only ever use one family history website, make it FamilySearch. It’s the largest free genealogy site in the world, with billions of searchable historical records and one shared family tree that already holds well over a billion people. It’s run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but anyone can use it. There’s no subscription, no credit card and no catch.

The first visit can feel like walking into a giant library without a map, though. So here’s the map: how to set up your account, add what you know, build and print a pedigree chart, and save the stories and photos that make a tree worth having. Give it one afternoon and you’ll be well on your way.

What you’ll find on FamilySearch

• Family Tree – one shared tree for the whole world. You add your family, and connect to ancestors other relatives have already added.
• Search – census records, birth, marriage and death records, immigration lists, church books, probate files and more, from almost every country.
• Memories – photos, documents, written stories and audio recordings, attached to the people in your tree.
• Research Wiki – free how-to guides for every U.S. state and most countries, written by genealogists.

Step 1: Create your free account

1. Go to FamilySearch.org and click Create Account.
2. Enter your name, birth date, a username and password, and an email address or phone number.
3. Confirm your account using the message FamilySearch sends you, then sign in.

Step 2: Add what you already know

Open Family Tree from the top menu, then choose Tree. You’ll see yourself, with empty spaces for your parents. Click Add Father or Add Mother and fill in what you know: full name (maiden names for women), birth date and place, and, if they’ve passed away, death date and place. Then do the same for each grandparent.

Don’t worry if you don’t know everything. A name and a rough year (“about 1920”) are enough to start. If you’d like to gather what you know on paper first, Part 2 of our free course walks you through it.

One thing makes FamilySearch different from most family tree sites, and it’s worth understanding before you add anyone:

• Living people are private. You, your parents, your kids: only you can see the living people you add.
• Deceased people are shared. There is just one record for Great-grandpa, and all of his descendants work on it together.

That’s why, when you add someone who has died, FamilySearch first shows you possible matches already in the tree. Look at them carefully. If your grandmother is already there, with the right spouse, dates and places, choose her instead of creating a new copy. Very often a cousin you’ve never met has already traced that line back several generations, and you’ve just inherited their work.

Step 3: Add details and sources

Click anyone in your tree, then click their name to open their person page. This is where the real work happens:

• Vitals – birth, christening, marriage, death and burial. Click any fact to edit it.
• Other information – alternate names, occupations, residences, military service and more.
• Sources – the records that prove each fact. On a shared tree, sources are what earn other people’s trust.

Watch the Research Help panel on the right side of the person page. FamilySearch suggests record hints there: census entries, marriage records and more that may belong to this person. Click a hint, compare it with what you know, and if it’s a match, attach it. The Source Linker shows the record and the tree side by side, so you can add the new details (and any missing children) in a few clicks.

You can also go looking yourself. Choose Search, then Records. A few habits help:

• Start broad. A name, a place and a birth year range of a few years either way. Add more only if you get too many results.
• Search women by maiden name for records before their marriage.
• Try spelling variations. Census takers wrote what they heard.
• Try full-text search for deeds, wills and court records. It searches the handwritten words themselves, so you can find ancestors in records no one has indexed by name.

For more on finding records, see How Do I Find Records? and Part 3 of our free course.

Step 4: Create a pedigree chart

Your tree already is a pedigree chart. FamilySearch just lets you look at it in different ways. In the tree view, use the menu in the top-right corner to switch between:

• Landscape – the classic pedigree layout, with each generation to the right of the last.
• Portrait – generations stacked top to bottom, with photos.
• Fan Chart – a half-circle with you at the center. It’s great for spotting the empty spots where research is needed.
• Descendancy – the people who came after an ancestor, which is handy for finding living cousins.

To print one: open the person page of whoever should start the chart (usually you), find Print Options in the Tools section, and pick a chart. Choices include a four-generation pedigree chart, a five-generation portrait chart and a seven-generation fan chart. FamilySearch makes a PDF you can print or save. A fan chart framed for a grandparent makes a great gift.

Prefer paper and pencil? Our free pedigree charts are ready to print, and Cousin Relationships Explained will help when the branches start multiplying.

Step 5: Add photos, stories and memories

Names and dates tell you who. Stories tell you who they were. FamilySearch Memories keeps them together, attached to the right people, so they show up for every relative who visits that ancestor.

Upload photos and documents

1. Choose Memories, then Gallery, and click the + (add) button.
2. Drag in photos, scanned letters, certificates or audio files.
3. Open each item, give it a title and a short description (who, where, when), and tag the people in it, linking each one to their spot in the tree.

Need to digitize first? Get Digital shows how to scan with just your phone.

Write a story

From Memories, choose to add a story, give it a title, and type away. You can also start a story right from an ancestor’s person page, on the Memories tab. It doesn’t need to be long. A few paragraphs is plenty. Not sure where to begin? Try one of these:

• The house they grew up in, and what the kitchen smelled like.
• How they met their husband or wife.
• Their job, and what a normal workday looked like.
• A saying, recipe or habit the family still repeats.
• The funniest thing anyone remembers them doing.

Record their voice

FamilySearch’s free mobile apps let you record short audio stories, or record a relative answering interview questions, and save them straight to Memories. Ten minutes with Grandma on the porch might be the most valuable thing in your whole tree. Our post on preserving family history with audio has more ideas.

When you get stuck

• FamilySearch Research Wiki – type a place, like “Ohio” or “County Cork,” to see which records exist and where to find them.
• Help Center – click the question mark (?) icon at the top of any FamilySearch page for step-by-step answers and community help.
• FamilySearch Centers – free help from volunteers in person, at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and at thousands of local centers worldwide.

And when you’re ready to give back, volunteer indexers are the reason those billions of records are searchable at all. Find out how in What Is the FamilySearch Indexing Project?

That’s it. You’ve got an account, a tree, a chart on the fridge and a story saved for the grandkids. For a step-by-step path from here, try our free course, Your Family Story.