Flexible View Relationship ID's

Bruce and Laurie

Research could be improved if the login user could specify a different ID than themselves when using the View Relationship. Many researchers have married children and often research is expanded to include their spouse's tree. It is our understanding that a person listed in the tree of a child's spouse would not show any relationship to the child's parents. If a researcher could change from their ID to a private ID's (such as a child's spouse) or to any public ID, then this would provide a mechanism to better display tree relationships.

We often research outside of our tree due to incorrectly attached sources, incorrectly merged trees, and other best guess assumptions. When the opportunity arises to correct an obvious issue we address the situation. Having the ability to see relationship structures referenced to any accessible ID would greatly help in this effort. I believe the following two new user settings and related code would meet most needs:

• "Tree Relationship Person": accepts an accessible valid ID as a reference point or if cleared, defaults to user login ID
• "Tree Relationship Spouse": 3 settings, OFF- no attempt to match with any spouse, PREFERRED - include matches with the preferred spouse, ALL - include matches with any listed spouse

Recent DNA research efforts has shown that relationships to a single ID may include multiple tree paths (small DNA matches on both Mother and Father trees). It is not clear to us how multiple relationship paths are managed in the Relationship View. I would hope all possible paths would be presented in some manner, not just the first match or the shortest. If this multiple path issue is a new design consideration, it might be worth including another user setting, Tree Relationship View: SHORTEST |ALL

Thank you for your consideration.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This is probably the second-most-frequent request in this Community (after "how do I search in just MY tree"). The answer is inevitably the third-party site RelativeFinder (https://www.relativefinder.org/#/start), which uses FS's Tree data to find direct relationships. Note that it is stricter than FS's tool: it only considers it a relationship if there's a common ancestor involved. It doesn't consider marriages anywhere, not even at the ends (like FS does).

Short of repeating your entire pedigree on Geni and/or WikiTree, I don't know of a way to generate a connection path like what those websites offer ("Salamon Grün is your spouse's second great uncle's wife's uncle's wife's brother's wife's first cousin once removed's wife's father").