Researching spouse's family lines?

I love the new FamilySearch capabilities and apps. Powerful tools!

I am beginning an effort to research my wife's family lines. I have a problem, though. When I am in FamilySearch.org and in the apps I don't have access to my wife's pedigree information. I cannot see her charts, let alone edit them, without her logging into the system and me working under her login.

Is there some setting that allows me to work in her lines without masquerading as her?

I have my own answer. I found the "Helper Number" field in my account profile. And then I found the "Help Others" button in the upper right of the data displays on the site.

Now to find the helper number input in the apps.

The Helper Number feature is not supported in the mobile apps at this point.

However, there's another way to accomplish what you want, which is even more convenient (in my experience). When you are signed in to FamilySearch.org as yourself, you just need to enter as many living people in your wife's line as is necessary to get back to deceased individuals. For example, if your wife's parents are living, but her grandparents are deceased, you would add your wife's father as a child of her paternal grandparents, and her mother as a child of her maternal grandparents, then add your wife as a child of her father and mother. These records that you are adding for living people are in what is called your "private space" and aren't visible to others. But once you have your wife's pedigree connected back to deceased ancestors, you will then be able to see all her ancestors from there back.

Note that any changes you make while signed in with her helper number, including reserving ordinances, will be under her name. If you do what I suggested, then you will be signed in as yourself, and all changes and reservations will be under your name.

One suggestion I've seen, but never tried: instead of adding the living from scratch, add them to your tree by using thier person ID. (Which you find out from your wife's login.) That avoids creating duplicates that will have to be merged later.

Thank you for the suggestions.

I tried adding the living using their Person ID. This did not work. The searches came up as "Not found" even though I knew I was entering the right ID. So, I took the tack of manually creating new people with the Person IDs of the right parents to get to the right tree.

Interesting. I'll have to mention that the next time it comes up in the FHCNET.

russellhltn wrote:One suggestion I've seen, but never tried: instead of adding the living from scratch, add them to your tree by using thier person ID. (Which you find out from your wife's login.) That avoids creating duplicates that will have to be merged later.

I don't know where that suggestion came from, but there's no way it can work. Maybe it worked in the past, but certainly can't work now. All living persons are in what is called a "private space" and each user has their own private space. There's no sharing of persons in different users' private spaces -- they are, well, "private".

So just add your own copy of living persons as needed, realizing that whatever information you add for such persons is just for your own data at this point.

aebrown wrote:All living persons are in what is called a "private space" and each user has their own private space. There's no sharing of persons in different users' private spaces -- they are, well, "private".

The privacy issues surrounding the data are significant. I think it is great that the tools have tight controls around such data. It is a bother in some ways, as we are discussing here, but I'm glad to be bothered rather than reveal data that hurts people.

Thank you for all the help!