How can I connect my husband's tree and mine to the same person from different common ancestors?
I got an email prompt from Family Search concerning a list of famous people I might be related to. One of them was Elvis Presley. On the cover it shows my relationship to Elvis with the ends of my tree. BUT, when I open the link to the tree for Elvis, it's my husband's tree that opens. Elvis also has a common ancestor with my husband. This thrilled me to no end because I had very little information about his grandmother! However, I don't know how to connect my family as shown on the cover page. Obviously we have different common ancestors. I have screen shots of the two pages, but it seems I can't share them here.
Answers
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Hello, were you perhaps signed in to FS as your husband when you clicked on the link?
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No, he has no interest in genealogy and he doesn't have a FS account.
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You might find the Relative Finder useful:
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@JoanneBabic Hi First of all, when you view relationships on Family Search, by design, it only shows the shortest path between you and the person of interest. In reality, we may have multiple lines of relationship to any other person, but only the shortest is shown.
The nature of Family Search is different from other genealogy programs when we speak of my tree versus someone else's tree. Family Search is one large tree with the goal of having only one person page (profile) for each individual. When we think of my tree, we are really thinking of a tree that starts with me and shows my ancestors. In Family Search, you can view a tree with anyone in Family Search as the starting person. So, you can view a tree with you as the starting person, your husband as the starting person, or even Elvis as the starting person. You can go to the person page (profile) of any one in Family Search and click on view tree. You will see a tree with that person as the starting person. The big difference in Family Search is that the tree you see is made of shared person or profiles. In other words, you are not seeing persons (profiles) that are uniquely yours. They are shared persons (profiles) with all the other users of Family Search.
In that light, to answer your question about connecting your husband's tree and your tree to the same person, you just have to make sure the tree, as viewed with you or your husband as the starting person, is correct at each generation. In other words, view the tree with you as the starting person and make sure as you step back one generation at a time, that everything is correct. Meaning you have the right children with the right parents, and you don't have any duplicate persons. You do this by checking each person page (profile) and making sure it is correct. Do the same thing with the tree viewed with your husband as the starting person. If both of the tree views are correct, then you are automatically linked with your husband through common ancestors.
Recognize that the core of any genealogical program, including Family Search, it the person page (profile) of each person. Everything else like the tree/pedigree views and relationship views are all built from individual person pages (profiles) and are only as accurate as each person page (profile). The goal is to have each person page (profile) as accurate as possible in terms of vital information and relationship information with no duplicates. Then we have the added benefit of being able to add to each individual memories and sources to make the individual complete.
Hope this helps. I know this gets a little technical. Good luck. And BTW, at the top of the Family Search pages, you can select "Activities" and see many items including how you relate to others.
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The issue that is causing some confusion here is that Family Tree calculates relationships a couple of different ways in different contexts.
For the Famous Relatives feature (on the Activities menu), Family Tree calculates only relationships that go through your ancestors. It does not include any relationships that go through your spouse. That feature will also not include any spousal relationships for the famous person (for example, my relationship to President Herbert Hoover would only be shown to him through his parents — it would not include any relationship through his wife, even if that was a closer relationship). When you view your relationship to a famous person in the Famous Relatives feature, the relationship chart will show the relationship through your ancestry.
But when you are viewing the person in Family Tree, a spousal relationship can be used at the beginning or end of the relationship chart in order to find the closest relationship. That may well be quite different from the relationship shown in the Famous Relatives feature. For example, my relationship to President Hoover in Famous Relatives is eleventh cousin three times removed, going up through my mother to our common ancestor, then back down to him through his father. But when I go to Herbert Hoover in Family Tree and view my relationship, I see that his is the husband of my wife's 9th cousin. That is clearly a closer relationship than an 11th cousin 3x removed, but it uses a spousal relationship both at the beginning (it goes through my wife's ancestry) and at the end (my wife is more closely related to Hoover's wife than to him, so it goes through his wife and not through his parents).
That difference in how relationships are calculated in different contexts leads people to say things such as what was stated in the original post: "when I open the link to the tree for Elvis, it's my husband's tree that opens."
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Family Tree posted a common ancestor for my husband and me. I can't find it now. How can I find it
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@SueJones74 I would be inclined to use the FT View Relationship function from yourself to each of his parents (if deceased, otherwise each of his grandparents).
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