My tree doesn't know who I am

RickDiamond1

I've identified myself on the tree as the "home" but when I identify ancestors it says I have no relationship with them. How do I tell FamilySearch who I am so it'll recognize me on my own tree? Thanks!

Gordon Collett

First step is to take a look at your account settings and who is the real "home" of your tree.

Go to Settings, then to the Account tab and scroll down to Family Tree Preferences:

Click on Edit to see this:

The name on the top is the name which View My Relationship uses no matter what the default root person has been set to. So if this was account was not set up with you as the root person and you "identified [yourself] on the tree as the 'home'" by going to this setting and placing yourself in that second spot, then that is your problem. The only way to fix this is to give this account back to whoever created it originally and create your own account with you as the starting person.

However, if your name and ID are on that first line, then something else is going on.

Keep in mind that View My Relationship is only following family relationships that already exist in the tree. If you know you are related to someone but no relationship shows, that means your family lines are not connected correct in Family Tree.

To check this, go to yourself, that is, set your Family Tree Starting Person to the first of the two people that might show there (which we hope is you) then go to the landscape pedigree view for that first person on the list. Now try to manually trace from that root person back to the person to whom you know you are related. If you can go step by step from child to parent back to a common ancestor then forward parent to child to that relative, then something is wrong with View My Relationship. Come back and report it. However, I suspect you will find that at some point along the line, a child has no parents and the line in Family Tree is broken.

One final point, View My Relationship only goes back 15 generations. It will say "No Relationship Found" for any ancestor farther back than that. So if you are trying to use View My Relationship to show your relationship to Charlemagne, you can't because he is too far back.

dontiknowyou

View My Relationship only goes back 15 generations. It will say "No Relationship Found" for any ancestor farther back than that.

A work-around is to find one of your ancestors far back in the tree, and use RelativeFinder.org to trace the path(s) from that ancestor to, say, Charlemagne.

gasmodels .

Just a thought - yes you are identified but have you connected yourself to you ancestors in the global tree. Are you parents, grandparents and great grandparents all appropriately linked. If there is no linkage in the tree the view my relationship cannot work. For example if you mother is living and she is not entered (you show no mother connected to her parents) you would have no relationship to any of your mothers relatives. Family Tree only knows relationships that a linked in the global tree.