Saturday, December 23, 2017

Denmark Church Records added to Family Search

Almost two years ago when I started doing Danish Family History, the only Danish records on Family Search were from an incomplete database of indexed baptism records (no image). With the help of the Research Wiki page about Denmark Genealogy I taught myself how to find records using a combination of looking at indexed census records on Danish Family Search and browsing through church records on Arkivalieronline.

At some point My Heritage acquired and indexed a huge number of Danish church books and census records, which has been really helpful at times. And now it looks like Family Search has gotten access to their databases and these records are available on FamilySearch.org. Over the past several months I've started noticing record hints about census records coming up. Then within the past couple of weeks the database "Denmark Church Records, 1484-1941" was apparently uploaded because my tree has exploded with record hints from this collection.

I've had mixed feelings about this. Part of me wonders why I felt so led to start doing Danish family history the hard way when I could have probably found these people in a much shorter amount of time if I had waited until now. I guess the benefit is that I learned some very valuable research techniques in the process that will continue to help me even with the indexed collections on Family Search. Not all of the records are indexed correctly, which means they won't all show up as record hints (or if they do, I've found that often the places are wrong), but I can still look them up on Arkivalieronline or Danish Family Search since I know how. I've also gained a fair amount of skill in reading gothic script and deciphering the records, which I probably wouldn't have picked up as well if I had been able to find these records through the record hints.

The explosion of record hints also means that I have a huge amount of work to do right now going through all the people I've researched and adding the record hints. The reason I need to work on this is because other well-meaning Family Search users often crawl through their trees adding all the record hints without giving a thought to whether they are correct or not. Then when I get my weekly changes email from Family Search I find out about bad merges and extra spouses and children from the other side of the country added to families, so I get to clean up the mess. I figure if I add the record hints myself I can prevent some of those headaches in the future. But it's a big project right now.

But once I get all of that sorted out, I can already tell that I'm going to be able to do research much faster than I ever have before. With record hints and searches on Family Search it will be incredibly easy to find records about people and in many cases quickly add entire families to the tree. God really is hastening the work of redeeming the dead. Ultimately I see this as an incredible blessing.

Friday, December 22, 2017

Help! Parts of my tree are missing!

A problem I often come across when helping people in my local family history library is missing portions of a family tree. In the most recent situation, a patron knew that her family tree went back several generations because she had seen them on her son's tree, but on her own tree there was a line that stopped at two of her great-grandparents. She was concerned that she would have to redo all of that research and add all the people one by one.

Fortunately, resolving this problem is actually much easier than this. If you know the line goes several generations back, all you need to do is find the people's profiles on Family Search and connect them to your family. Then the rest of the ancestors should show up. Here I'm going to walk through one situation like this that I found while doing research.

In the image below, you can see that the line stops at Cilius Sorensen. Neither of his parents are listed. I know his tree should extend farther back than this because I know his father and paternal grandparents are already on Family Search.


What I need to do is find his father and connect him to Cilius Sorensen, and when I do that the grandparents will already be connected as well.

First, I click Add Father:


When I do that, this form opens up:


I know that Cilius' father's name was Rasmus Christian Sorensen, and he was born in about 1856 in Glesborg, Randers, Denmark, so I enter this information in the appropriate fields and click next.


On the next screen, Family Search shows me some possible matches.


Usually at this point people recognize the names or information and it's an easy matter to add the ancestors to the person's tree. In this case, I know the first possible match is the correct one because I recognize his parents' names and the birth information matches. So I click the blue Add Match button and that will add Rasmus Christian Sorensen and his parents to Cilius Sorensen's tree.

Here is what Cilius Sorenson's tree looks like after clicking Add Match:


As you can see, the only person I had to add was his father, and the grandparents were automatically added since they were already connected to Rasmus Christian Sorensen.

You may have to add a generation or two of living people before you can hook up to the people already on Family Search. For example, I wanted to be able to see my husband's ancestors on my tree, so I had to create new pages for his parents, who are still living, then when I added their parents I was connected to my husband's entire tree.