Adopted parents/multiple parents

Brinha

I would like to know if there is a way for me to be able to sort family lines at will between my adopted and bio parents. This is Utah and because of the shallow pool in Utah's history, my biological and adopted family lines intersect often. I find that at one moment, I will be on a particular ancestor or figuring out how I'm related to a specific person, then the app will just decide to flip that line to another parent. I do not want this to keep happening. The problem is that marking different sets of parents as "preferred" for these searches doesn't do anything. FamilySearch just decides to populate whichever line it wants to regardless of where I was the moment before and also regardless of if that parent is biological, step, or adopted. How do you fix this so that you can pick and choose certain family lines to look at and keep them there until you decide to choose another? I was specifically looking at one common ancestor to a friend and getting history on that person and then when I refreshed, it switched to another set of parents and that line also had a common ancestor, but not the one I was looking at. It's very confusing.

PABulfinch

There is a Knowledge Article in the Help Center that gives the directions on how to specify biological, adoptive, foster, etc. Here is the link to that Knowledge Article. Biological, step, adopted, and foster relationships in Family Tree • FamilySearch.

Brinha

My inquiry does indicate that I already understand how to designate a parent and the issue is a little more technical than just designating parents as adopted/biological/etc.

Alan E. Brown

When determining how you are related to a person in Family Tree, FamilySearch will always find the shortest relationship path through a common ancestor, with a possible couple relationship at the end or the beginning. As you have noted, all parent-child relationships (and at the beginning or end, couple relationships) are included. It makes no difference if those parent-child relationships are biological, adopted, guardianship, etc.; if the couple relationships are designated as marriage, common-law, etc.; or if any of those relationships are preferred. It is simply the shortest path. Computing relationships requires a fair amount of computing power, and including any of those factors in determining the relationship path (especially preferred relationships, which are a per-user preference) would significantly increase the required computing power.

Of course, there can be multiple paths to a person, and there could be ties in what is the shortest path. I could be someone's 2nd cousin twice removed through one path, and 2nd cousin twice removed through another path. I don't know how those ties are broken. But it's entirely possible that you arrived at a person working through one set of relationships, but a different set of relationships happens to be the shortest path to that person. How you got to a person is also not a factor in computing a relationship.

Although I think I understand what you are hoping for, it seems impractical from a computational standpoint, as well as a user-interface standpoint. The particular relationship you wish were chosen differently in computing the relationship path might be anywhere along the path, and I don't see how the system could reasonably understand your wishes or how you could even specify that preference. But if you are working on a line that has these kinds of overlapping relationships, I certainly see how it could be frustrating to have different lines used for relationships.

JLEd17

There definitely can be an “information overload” factor for those of us in families with multiple marriages, adoptions, biological parents that don’t have any official paper trail, etc. I receive all sorts of notices and hints for my stepfather’s ancestors (which I do not want to research). Would be great if I could “mute” this family line. I must say that I am grateful that my biological father’s second marriage was to someone from another country. Her ancestors don’t have an easy paper trail soI lucked out on not having yet more info, notices, and hints to wade through.

What this reminds me of is when I use an online mapping system for directions. There are multiple paths, they may overlap, but it is possible to choose one over the other without it jumping from one pathway to another at the overlap zones.

Brinha

Thank you, Alan. That definitely makes sense. Oddly enough, this particular person is related to the exact same generation - in fact, one tree is the male of a married couple in the past and the other line is his wife. So they both say they are 9th cousins twice removed. I understand that maybe in the past there was an age gap or shorter line, but it's still interesting that this would choose the female of the line over the male.

I feel like we're at the level of tech in the world that developers for the application should be able to solve for this particular problem by now.