FamilySearch Central in RootsMagic can be an extremely valuable tool once you learn how to work with it.
Imagine this
Imagine that instead of wading through hint after hint looking for a missing fact, you could instantly compare what you have with what someone else has already found.
You spend an evening on an ancestor and get as far as “born in England.” A few days later, FamilySearch Central flags that same person as changed. Now the record says he was born in Warwick, Warwickshire, England. You open the change history and see that user RM897 made the edit. You can send RM897 a message and ask where they found it.
That is the real value of FamilySearch Central. It doesn’t just sync your tree. It tells you when someone else has found something about your ancestors.
Opening FamilySearch Central: about 1 minute per 1,000 people
When you open FamilySearch Central, RootsMagic checks every person you have linked to FamilySearch, one quick request per person. It asks for each person’s current version and compares it with the version RootsMagic saved last time. If they don’t match, the person is marked as changed.
In 92 full scans of my 2,343 linked people, the check took 1 minute per 1,000 people almost every time (0.9 to 1.1 minutes). That works out to about 17 people per second.
| Linked people | Time to open |
| 1,000 | about 1 minute |
| 2,343 (my tree) | about 2.3 minutes |
| 5,000 | about 5 minutes |
| 10,000 | about 10 minutes |
The 2,343 row is what I measured. The larger sizes assume the time keeps rising in a straight line, and your internet connection will move these numbers a little. Closing FamilySearch Central runs the same check again.
Your tree changes while you’re away
On a typical day, about 19 of my linked people (0.8%) had a new version on FamilySearch since my last session. While I was actually working in FamilySearch Central, only 1 or 2 changed.
Over two months (September 1 to October 30, 2026):
- 447 people (19%) changed at least once
- 125 changed three or more times
- 55 changed five or more times
Famous ancestors get edited the most. These were my top five:
| Ancestor | Times changed |
| William Brewster (Mayflower) | 20 |
| Christopher Yonges | 13 |
| Mary Love Wentworth | 13 |
| Dorothy Tuthill | 12 |
| Margaret Elivin | 12 |
If you descend from a well-known colonial family, expect those people to change often.
Who is doing the editing
Since September 1, 85% of the changes on my linked people were made by someone else. Only 15% were mine. Across the full change histories of my linked people, more than 3,600 different FamilySearch users have contributed.
The most common changes were relationships: children added to or removed from parents, and spouses linked or unlinked. Sources being attached came next, then person merges (1,559), then changes to birth and death details.
One thing to know: about 12% of version changes have no matching entry in FamilySearch’s change history. The person is flagged as changed, but nothing visible was edited. FamilySearch sometimes updates a record in the background, for example when it checks a place name or when someone dismisses a suggestion. If you open a changed person and can’t find anything new, this is probably why.
Problems are rare. In two months, 10 of my 2,343 linked people had been merged or deleted on FamilySearch, and 3 were restricted so I could no longer view them.
What RootsMagic checks when you open your database
Just opening your database does not check your whole tree. RootsMagic only asks FamilySearch for record hints on a small, fixed group of people.
In my database that group was the same 32 family members on every open (12 out of 12 opens). They were me and close family, mostly from the Banks, Meyers and Ray lines. No one else showed up more than 20% of the time, and those extra people were usually ones I had been working on recently.
The full change check only happens when you open FamilySearch Central.
How to work with it
- Open FamilySearch Central at the start of each session. Allow about a minute for every 1,000 linked people.
- Let the scan finish before you click anything. If you click to view new information, or close FamilySearch Central, the scan stops. You will not have found all the changed people, and the number of changes keeps adding up.
- When the scan is done, click View in the “What’s New” section of the FamilySearch Central window. This brings up the people who changed on FamilySearch.
- Everyone in this list is flagged as modified. Just clicking on a person resets their flag to not modified, so once you click someone, finish with them before you move on.
- For each changed person, compare FamilySearch with what you have. Look for new places, dates and attached sources.
- When something has been added, deleted or changed, you have three choices. You can research it, change your own record, or contact the person who made the change. The change history on FamilySearch shows who that was.
- When you are done with a person, move to the next one and repeat.
- Keep an eye on your famous ancestors. They are edited the most, so mistakes and merges show up there first.
- Let the scan finish on the way out too. Leaving FamilySearch Central runs the same scan, and it needs the same time to complete.
This is why it helps to know how long a scan should take. At about a minute per 1,000 people, my 2,343 linked people take about 2.3 minutes going in and the same coming out. I run Fiddler Classic© from Telerik so I can watch the API calls and see when the scan is running. Without Fiddler, use the clock: if you stopped sooner than that, the scan did not finish.
Orphaned records
RootsMagic will not tell you when a record you linked has been merged away on FamilySearch. FamilySearch technically deletes the ID you linked to, so your link now points at nothing. That is an orphaned record.
I started with 27 of these, nearly all from merges, and I only knew because I could see the failed calls in Fiddler. You don’t need Fiddler to find them. An orphaned link ends up with a blank version, so this query lists them. It only reads, and you can run it in any SQLite tool on a copy of your database:
SELECT f.rmID, f.fsID, n.Given, n.Surname
FROM FamilySearchTable f
JOIN NameTable n ON n.OwnerID = f.rmID AND n.IsPrimary = 1
WHERE f.fsVersion = '';
I had one ancestor, Isaac Ludlow, who I found was merged into another FamilySearch record. A record you are restricted from viewing can show up too. To fix an orphaned record:
- In RootsMagic, go to the person and open FamilySearch Person Tools. Both sides come up as usual, with no sign of a problem.
- Click Show on FamilyTree. FamilySearch shows “Deleted Person” and names the surviving person the record was merged into.
- Research which record is right before you change anything.
- If the original should stand, restore it. If that leaves a duplicate, merge the surviving person into it. Your link stays intact.
- If the original should not come back, unmatch the person in RootsMagic and match them to the correct record.
Check these carefully. A wrong match can affect a whole family line, because when a person is merged out of a family, someone else may no longer match a parent, spouse or child.
Where these numbers come from
I recorded every request RootsMagic 11, and then RootsMagic 12, sent to FamilySearch between September 1 and October 30, 2026, using Fiddler Classic, and stored them in a database for analysis. That added up to about 282,000 requests, 92 full scans of 2,343 linked people, and 42,000 change-history entries. Your numbers will differ with the size of your tree, your internet connection and how famous your ancestors are.
Head to the Forum for a discussion of this topic.