Research suggestion: Allow us to View relationships between any two deceased individuals

Zark

The 'View Relationship' link on person articles in the collaborative tree on FamilySearch is incredibly useful for research purposes. It's not just an 'oh, that's nice' sort of feature. It actually really matters for research, and I use it daily, pretty much. However, it would be considerably more helpful if we could view relationships between any two individuals that we can personally see on the tree.

Benefits:

• The limitation of it checking only a certain number of generations wouldn't be a very big issue anymore.
• If someone keeps removing one of your ancestors from your tree, you can still see people's relationship with that person without having to rely on that person being in your tree at any given moment.
• It is generally helpful to know how people are related to each other when doing research (particularly when doing genetic genealogy; see below).

For instance, I have an ancestor I'm researching in my tree. However, people keep disagreeing with each other on whether there is sufficient evidence for that ancestor to be there, attached to his son (some people think there's more than enough evidence, and some people think there isn't any). So, I'm doing genetic research to help resolve this. I research a lot of DNA matches. When I come upon someone who I suspect might be a DNA match via the aforementioned relative's side of the family, it would be nice if I could actually use the `View Relationship` link to have it automatically search connections even if that person isn't in my tree at a given moment. Whenever they remove that person from the tree, that means I have to do things manually.

So, you might be wondering why `View Relationship` is even important for research. I'll explain. One of the biggest ways it help is by helping you to figure out how your DNA matches are related quickly (the faster, the better; do you know how many DNA matches there are? It can take a while to figure this stuff out without the button). For instance, I find a match on Ancestry.com's DNA service. I see they have a tree with just one of their parents who isn't deceased. I can go to FamilySearch and use the Find feature to try to find that deceased relative. If they're on the tree, I go to their page and hit `View Relationship` and often, that can do much of the rest of the work there for me, instead of requiring me to analyze the tree manually (and potentially miss something).

[If the person I use the FInd feature on in a given situation isn't actually in the tree, then I might look for their parents in the tree (who I might have to research to figure out first).]

Now, let's say we find the person, but no relationship is found. That means I need to research their spouse (actually, I do that anyway, for a number of reasons). So, I find out the people they married, or whatever, find their parents, and look them up on FamilySearch to see how they're related (using View Relationship again). If they have lots of spouses, I might have to do it with all of them.

Anyway, one of the reasons I research even the unrelated spouses is because if they have children, then I'm going to be related to those children, and those children might not have my side of the family in their tree. It helps us figure things out. It also helps those children with their own genealogy (and helps Ancestry.com improve features like ThruLines for everyone concerned). Plus, sometimes I'm actually closely related to people on both sides of the family (so, it's good to know if this is the case or not, especially when the person is a DNA match). We don't want to confound research.

I'm aware that View Relationship is sometimes compounded by it following step-relations, adopted relations, and incorrectly added relations (sometimes compounded by merges), but much more often than not, it's very helpful.

If you're wondering how this might be helpful for temple work, it helps you discover how you're related to people in other people's trees on Ancestry who aren't actually even on FamilySearch yet (after you've added them to a connected person on FamilySearch's collaborative tree). If you're related in the correct way, and the individuals died long enough ago, you can do the temple work. Plus, you can often find additional siblings (and their children) of those people who weren't in any tree, and get the work done for them, too.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I think one reason FS hasn't assigned any of its limited resources to expansion of the View Relationship function is that BYU has already done so, in its RelativeFinder tool.