Our purpose is to help families work together to make connections and discover their heritage.
The overall purpose of FamilySearch Family Tree is to "...enable inspiring journeys that bring joy to all people as they discover, gather, and connect their family—past, present, and future." We aim to help you discover your family and, in turn, discover more about yourself. To learn more about FamilySearch, visit FamilySearch.org/about.
FamilySearch International is found online at www.familysearch.org. Family Tree is the FamilySearch product that helps users discover and document their family histories. Family Tree is different from other genealogy websites. Some differences include:
- Family Tree is a free, shared, collaborative, public tree linking families together with the goal of connecting every member of the human family. Every user of Family Tree works together on the same data. Other sites only allow users to create and manage their own private trees.
- Family Tree compares historical records to people in the tree to provide Research Helps on a person's profile.
- Family Tree compares similar people in the tree to locate potential duplicate profiles for a person, which can possibly be merged.
- Family Tree provides messaging and collaboration tools to facilitate communication between users and resolve data issues. FamilySearch Support options are also available internationally at no cost.
- Family Tree draws from FamilySearch's enormous and growing database to provide record hints and research help. Hints can link family members across generations.
- Family Tree Memories help foster deeper connections to ancestors, allowing users to preserve and share photos and histories.
FamilySearch works globally to gather and preserve historical records, making them accessible and easy to use for researchers around the world—regardless of Church membership. The Search option in FamilySearch Family Tree can locate informational items, including records, images, genealogies, books, and newspapers. The FamilySearch Catalog offers advanced search options, enabling users to explore information as general or as specific as they prefer. While some records may not be available on FamilySearch.org, FamilySearch has centers worldwide that offer additional viewing rights for many records.
Our hope is that, as you use FamilySearch Family Tree, we can create a well-sourced, easy-to-use, global, and publicly viewable record of our family histories. We encourage FamilySearch users and their family members to connect with both their deceased and living relatives. The FamilySearch Family Tree combines opportunities for collaboration and extensive record collections as tools to aid beginner and expert users in their search for family.
For Church members
In his opening remarks in the October 2005 General Conference, President Gordon B. Hinckley stated:
"One of the most troublesome aspects of our temple activity is that as we get more and more temples scattered across the earth there is duplication of effort in proxy work. People in various nations simultaneously work on the same family lines and come up with the same names. They do not know that those in other areas are doing the same thing. We, therefore, have been engaged for some time in a very difficult undertaking. To avoid such duplication, the solution lies in complex computer technology. Preliminary indications are that it works, and if this is so, it will be a truly remarkable thing with worldwide implications."
As fulfillment of that statement, FamilySearch has developed Ordinances Ready, allowing members to quickly reserve a name for temple ordinances. With technological advancements come both challenges and miracles. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping to index records more quickly. Such rapid record digitization, with human oversight, enables FamilySearch to continue developing tools that increase the accessibility of temple work.
The FamilySearch Family Tree is fulfilling President Hinckley's promise, as well as the family history revelations and promises of other prophets. Some of the ways we see the fulfillment of such prophecies include:
- FamilySearch Family Tree features continue to be developed to help you find, reserve, prepare, and share temple ordinances.
- Family Tree compares records and sources, which resolves and prevents duplication of ordinances for family members.