FamilySearch offers multiple views for organizing and presenting your genealogy: landscape, portrait, fan chart, descendancy, and first ancestor. Depending on your goals and interests, each view can provide you with a unique pathway for exploring your family tree. The Family Tree’s portrait view was recently updated to make exploring and expanding your family lines easier on the web.
What Is Portrait View?
The portrait view family tree chart (or pedigree chart) is organized vertically. Your profile is in the middle of the chart, with your ancestors above you and your descendants below.
Enhancements Added to Portrait View
The new updated portrait view comes with new features to make the pedigree chart more effective and convenient:
- View siblings. In addition to seeing direct-line ancestors, you can now view your family’s collateral lines, which includes your ancestors’ siblings and their descendants. You can do this by clicking the arrows on the side of an individual’s card.
- View a single family line. When you previously wanted to view a relative’s line, the couple’s line would be expanded to show both spouses’ parents and grandparents. Now, you see only the family line extended through the specific ancestor you’re interested in viewing, saving more screen space and keeping your research focused.
- View multiple family lines at the same time. In the past, whatever family line you had displayed would automatically close if you clicked a different family line. Not anymore. Each family line that you open stays on screen until you decide to close it.
- Add relatives quickly without leaving the page. You can now add a relative’s child, spouse, or sibling directly from the individual’s card by clicking the + icon. (You can only add a spouse with the + icon if there is no spouse already added. If there is an existing spouse, additional spouses will need to be added through the individual’s profile page.)
- Distinguish living individuals more easily. Visual changes have been made to more clearly indicate which people in your tree are living and which have passed away. (For living individuals, this only applies to the relatives and family members that you alone have added to Family Tree. Any information about a living person that someone else adds is private and wouldn’t be visible to you — unless you’re working together in a family group tree.)
How to Access Portrait View
The updated portrait view is now available for all users. To try it out, simply log in to your FamilySearch account and navigate to the Family Tree. Then, make sure you have Portrait selected in the top right corner. For even more details about what’s new in this update, you can read this FamilySearch Help article.
Give Us Your Feedback
Check out the new portrait view today, and tell us what you think! There are 2 great ways to send your feedback:
- Join the Community. Engage with other users, and share your thoughts, questions, suggestions, and more with the FamilySearch engineering team.
- Use the Feedback Button: Located on the left side of the portrait view, this button allows you to give quick feedback on your experience. While you may not receive a direct response, your input will be read and considered by FamilySearch.
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At FamilySearch, we care about connecting you with your family, and we provide fun discovery experiences and family history services for free. Why? Because we cherish families and believe that connecting generations can improve our lives now and forever. We are a nonprofit organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To learn more about our beliefs, click here.
