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.