Tips for using FamilySearch Person Tools

RootsMagic
1

I’ve just starting exploring the FS Person Tools screen and would love some advice or best practices. Some of my key questions are:

  1. If FSPT finds 4 good matches (green) for an RM person, should I match my RM person to all of the FS persons until I get more information to identify the specific, right one?
  2. If someone changes an FS person I’ve matched to an RM person, will I get notified? How will I know if that happens?
2

I think many of us (myself included) start out with notion that we can match up our RM database with the tiny portion of FamilyTree that has our RM people, and thereafter we can keep the two synced. I don’t think that’s at all practical, and I long since quit trying. I could certainly be wrong, and there may be users who are more successful at this strategy than am I.

What I do instead is for some of the people in FamilyTree who are most important to my research, I mark them as Follow. This has to be done in Family Tree itself, not in RM. Thereafter, I receive email notices of changes to those FamilyTree people whom I’m Following.

1 Like
3

That’s similar to the approach I’ve been considering: use the tool to find possible matches, then Follow them on FS directly. But don’t actually link them.

5

  1. The RM person can only match to one person on FamilySearch. If the others are duplicates you can merge them in FamilySearch.

  2. Go to Publish, FamilySearch Central to login. Then leave that screen open doing nothing else in RM. The “What’s New” needs to update. It will list people that have changes since the last time you viewed them.

6

Thanks for the clarifications on how the tool works.

7

One note of caution – you can “accidentally” have more than one RM ID / Person with the same FS ID. do not confuse this with duplicate FS IDs. That would need to be fixed (merged) on the RM side and has nothing (usually) to to with the Fam Search side.

Each RM person can only match to ONE FS ID (1:1 Ratio) however if you make any error or due to changes it is possible to have many RM people to ONE FS ID. (Many RM people / IDs to the one FS ID). I actually did that this morning

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