Search for a Family

Searching for a family is the second step when searching for an individual, if you do not find that person. You will automatically need to search for a family member.

This search is slightly different than searching for a person. At this point, you are searching only by last name; not by first name. The Communication and Address fields work the same as searching for an individual.

Watch this video for a demonstration of best practices when searching and adding. If you are already familiar with searching just for an individual, you can move to approximately the 6-minute marker to just see searching by family. However, the first part of the video shows some tips to use when you do not immediately find the individual, but the person is actually in the database.

Note

When you start on the family page and are adding a member to an existing family, you will not see the Search For Family option, since you are starting with an existing family.

Search by any combination of the following fields. You do not need to fill the form out completely. Start with a more general search, then narrow your search to reduce your list. In this case, less is more really does apply.

Last Name

Enter all or part of just the last name. The search matches the beginning of the last name, middle name or former name.

Communication

You can enter any part of an email address. For example, entering gmail.com will find anybody with a Gmail email address.

Or you can enter any part of any phone number.

Caution

Do not include punctuation or spaces in the phone number.

Address

You can put any part of the address: | - street number | - street name | - city | - state abbreviation

Don’t try to search for the entire address. Just one of these at a time.

Results

The results are similar to the Individual Person search but the links serve a different purpose.

If you find someone in the immediate family of the person you were searching for, Click on the name of anyone in the family that is in the list. This will allow you to to add a new person to that person’s family.

If you do not find a family member, select Add New Family to create a new person in a new family.

Note

When you click Add New Family you will be adding the first person to that new family. You will be able to add more members to that family after you have added the first person.