Descendancy view: Children of person with no spouse not displayed in ancestors' trees
If a person (A) has no spouse but does have children, then those children are not displayed when the descendancy view is expanded to have one of A's ancestors as the root person. If a spouse is then added to A (not as a parent of the children), the ancestor's descendancy reverts to the expected structure with a dummy [Unknown Name] as the children's parent. The children do appear if A is the root person of the view.
This is not a one-off; I have reproduced it with a simple chain of three generations of living people. As a visible example, the deceased person where I discovered this behavior is one Anne White (LK9L-L7H). She has a son, William Samuel White, and a father and grandfather, both named William White. In the father's and the grandfather's descendancy views, Anne appears not to have a child.
This problem applies only to the descendancy view; the portrait and landscape views can be expanded to show the children.
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Yes
This problem applies only to the ascendancy view; the portrait and landscape views can be expanded to show the children.
Also, one can add in your Person view the Spouse as" Mrs." plus the paternal husband's name.
That works too.
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@BernieBeleskey, thanks for your suggestion. However, my aim was not to to find a workaround for this particular profile by modifying the tree data. It was to get the descendancy code fixed to display the existing data correctly.
By 'add in your Person view the Spouse as" Mrs."', I assume you mean create a profile for the father, i.e. "Mr. White". In general, I avoid creating spurious spouses/partners (especially those named "?" which just raise red flags and distract users). In this particular case, the mother's and the child's surnames are the same and there was a father but no known husband. The father's name was probably not White, so creating an imaginary spouse would not help.
I would not have known of the son's existence had I not looked elsewhere (e.g. by making Anne the root person of the descendancy view or by looking at her profile page). There are likely many thousands of similar profiles in FamilyTree.
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@JulianBrown38 I'm having trouble recreating this problem. In the descendancy view of Anne White's grandfather I see her grandfather, her father, Anne, and her son. You need to click the arrows by the person's name to expand the chart.
Is this still a problem for you?
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@Ashlee C. I can duplicate the problem easily — I don't understand why your experience is different from what I and @JulianBrown38 are seeing (now I do understand — see UPDATE below). I can use the options menu to choose to show 4 generations, and then I see Anne White's son (by an unknown father). But when I only show 3 generations, there is no arrow that would allow me to show any descendants of Anne White:
UPDATE: I just figured out what is different. If you choose the Options menu and uncheck the Spouses checkbox, then you will see an arrow by Anne White. Although that makes a bit of sense (she has no spouse, so you don't get an arrow to show her spouse when you are showing spouses), that arrow is not only the way to see a spouse, but also the gateway to seeing any children. It's odd that the absence of a spouse would also make it impossible to access the next generation of children, unless you choose not to show spouses for anyone in the view.
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Thanks @Alan E. Brown, you're exactly right. For various reasons, I always have the Spouses checkbox checked.
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The Descendancy view will begin to be updated shortly just as the Landscape and Fan Chart have been.
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