After you log in, on the right side, there will be a “Recommend Tasks” area
If you click the icon on the top right you will see a legend of the three types of hints. If you’re lucky enough to have a Temple Opportunity, start there. Otherwise, most hints are Record Hints. Here are the types of hints:
With these, you are going to go through and match up records with people and make sure everything matches. Your objective is to:
- Verify that what is already on Family Search is correct and correct it is it’s not
- See if you can find any new information
Here is an example of what to do with a very basic example:
Expand again by pressing the right arrow and click the “Review” button:
A new window will open. Click the compare button:
Compare details and if you think it’s the same person and if there is new information, click the add button to add the new information to your Family Search record. Then press “Attach.” Or, if it’s not the same person, choose “Not a Match.”
Close the window then go back to Recommend Tasks and keep going until you find something interesting, like a person that’s not on Family Search or dates not on Family Search that was needed before temple work could be done.
FamilySearch has found tons of good hints for me, like lots of marriage records I would have never found on my own cause the child moved to a different city. Or census records using variations on their name I wouldn’t think to search for, children that died at a young age that weren’t on censuses, so I didn’t know about them.
Through a hint on FamilySearch and by search on Ancestry.com, I was able to find my great-grandfather’s brother that came over from Italy with him that we knew nothing about but his name and birth date. He moved to a different state, owned a grocery store, had 8 children and a Will with tons of details about his family. Now we’re just trying to find a living relative that will respond to us. But it all started because of a little hint in FamilySearch. You never know what you may find!
And keep checking back, because FamilySearch is constantly scanning and records are being added all the time and new hints appear often.
Leave a Reply