A friend called me recently to ask why the children in a family were out of order on Family Tree in familysearch.org.
I happen to know the answer to that one. It’s a pretty easy fix and saves a lot of frustration for order loving genealogists. In the above family group you will notice that the children are not in order. Janet Erskine Young was born in 1874 yet eight of her younger siblings appear before her in the family group.
The reason for children being out of order is that either the birth date or place are not standardized. Simply standardizing these items will put the children in order.
Here is Janet’s Vital Information. I clicked on her birth info.
This opens the birth info. Next I clicked edit.
You can see that the birth date is yellow and claims ‘No Standard Selected’. Pretty silly since the date is written in standard format. I simply delete the 4 at the end of 1874 and then type the 4 again.
The next step is also silly but important for fixing the problem. I wrote the date correctly but I need to select the version FamilySearch suggests in the drop down menu even though it is identical to what I typed.
After choosing the date provided by FamilySearch I click save. I have now successfully standardized Janet Erskine Young’s birth info.
And there she is at the top of her family where she belongs. Now I need to go standardize the rest of her siblings so that 6 year gap doesn’t trick anyone into thinking there are missing children when they are really just at the bottom of the family group.
There you have it, ordering children in Family Tree on familysearch.org.
It’s people like you who make things easy for people like me! Thanks!!!
You are welcome! Thank you for the nice compliment. 🙂
Goodness gracious. So we have to watch out for computer programing anomalies in addition to watching all our genealogy stuff. That is certainly good to know and understand. Thanks for sharing that tip.
No kidding right?! There are a few funny little things about FamilySearch like that. They work so hard but it is challenging to provide what they do for free and have everything work perfectly. I know several FamilySearch employees so I hear all sides of these issues. I just try to find a work around like this when there is a problem and hope it’s something they can fix at some point.