Has anyone here figured out how to link to an individual book page on FamilySearch?

Question

When FamilySearch updated their book viewer last year, they changed it from a 'whole book' viewer to a single page viewer.  I thought this meant that we'd now be able to link to a specific page, but I haven't figured out how to do it or if it's possible.

Here's an example first page to a book:  https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/120688-colgan-pedigree?viewer=1&offset=0#page=1&viewer=picture&o=info&n=0&q=

I've highlighted the page number.  If you scroll through the book, the URL changes.  Example for page 8:  https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/120688-colgan-pedigree?viewer=1&offset=0#page=8&viewer=picture&o=info&n=0&q=

However, if you click that link or paste it into a browser URL, page 1 is displayed.  The same thing happens if you do a page refresh.  I asked FS about this and just got a canned response indicating that the question wasn't understood.  I assume this behavior is on the server side, but wanted to ask here in case someone has a solution.  Thanks.  

Answer 1

Hi Kerry,

Try removing all the variables from the URL except viewer and page:

https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/120688-colgan-pedigree?viewer=1&page=8

Comments

What the ...?  I was sure I had tried that, many times, but clearly not correctly.  Thanks so much for providing a solution that has vexed me for quite a while.  Hopefully your answer will also be helpful to others.  Many don't even realize that FS hosts a large library of digitized books.

---

Glad to help - you can't just drop everything after the page=8 in their provided URL. You have to get rid of the offset=0# also. I believe they're doing some redirection and ending up with a malformed URL that just defaults to the first page.

---

Thanks, Rick.  This helped me too!

Answer 2

I see what you mean.  Most FamilySearch records have image numbers (e.g. 100 of 350) but this doesn't, and the record doesn't even seem to have page numbers.

So I'm not answering your question directly, but what I would do if I were you is link to the book, then in your footnote explain how many pages to page forward and describe the page heading of the page you want.

Comments

It is possible to navigate to a specific page by entering it in the lower right corner, for example "8/41".  Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a way to get there directly via link.