Relatives
When the Olympics were on I found some of my relatives who won Olympic medals under the the famous relatives under activities. Now they are not there. What happened ?? Where did they go, I can't find them. I sure want to view them again.
Thanks. (name removed) Rutter (email removed)
Answers
-
Did you record how you were related to these people?
Where links are many generations back, as is often the case, chances increase that someone may come along and change or break a link somewhere in the chain.
0 -
@rutter Mod note: Community is a public online forum. For your privacy, your post was edited to remove a name that is not part of your username and other contact information. Please see the Community Code of Conduct for more details.
0 -
I know I am related cause when I search for them on the " person " page it shows how we are related .Where did they go ??? I can't remember the whole list . Nothing changed. Just after the Olympics the names of my Olympic relatives were removed . I would like to see them again. Thanks
0 -
Most genealogy websites offer short-term special features, such as showing how we may be related to a certain group during a relevant event. For example, during the Olympics, one of the for-pay websites offered a stylized Olympics sports card with ethnicity percentages.
Such a feature may come around again, but those short-term concepts are not intended to be permanent.
1 -
l don't know what you are talking about. My question is to Family Search, not pay for sites out there . You are not answering my question. It is a simple question. Where are my famous relatives on your site, Family Search ??? Don't tell me they are short lived short term. All my other famous relatives are still showing up since I first saw them.
0 -
@rutter, Áine — like almost everyone here — is just another user of FamilySearch. It is no more her website than it is yours.
The Famous Relatives feature, like everything under Activities, is just a fluffy bit of human interest clickbait. It consistently tells me that I have no famous relatives. (They've fixed the wording slightly; it no longer implies that I have no relatives at all.)
I presume that for the Olympics, they must have temporarily added some Olympians to their list of famous people, but once the event was over, they culled the list to their more usual level of fame.
2 -
@rutter My apologies if my response was not clear. I used the example the other website to indicate that such a practice happens everywhere and is short-term, not permanent.
1 -
Given that any of this relative tracing is only as good as the information in the Tree (ever varying, and of quality varying from excellent to lousy), and that the individuals shown as Famous Relatives are a very subjective, US focused, and changeable list: taking the Famous Relatives information shown on a particular day as more than light entertainment is unwise.
1 -
I think it would be good to have a Wikipedia link option somewhere on the profile, and a not-quite-so-famous-but-possibly-more-global-and-interesting Relatives display based on Wikipedia (and not just the English one). They'd be easily checkable and fixable, and Wikipedia, though not remotely perfect, is much better policed than FSFT, so the correction of inconsistencies between the two could have a positive effect on FSFT quality. (FSFT, being user-maintained, would never be allowed as a Wikipedia source; a Wikipedia article itself should probably not be specified as a formal FSFT source, but its mandatory independent, reliable sources might well be candidates.)
0 -
@rutter The feature was meant to be temporary and was making use of the Olympics being held as a way to let people have some fun in Family Tree. They will probably show up again with the next Olympics.
I agree that the Famous Relatives page is just a collection of entertaining trivia. It is something we can easily reproduce ourselves if willing to put in a bit of work.
As far as I can see, all that page is doing is taking a limited list of Family Tree profiles that people might be interested in and running the View My Relationship routine against them. Picking those profiles probably has a few criteria that I suspect are things like: 1) Deceased or famous enough that in the country they live there are exceptions to the usual privacy laws. 2) Have enough public interest to be worth having on the list. 3) Have a complete enough pedigree in Family Tree to expect a lot of people will connect with them.
I assume that most people will find, as I do, that except for a handful of Pioneers that went to Utah between 1847 and 1900, I generally connect to any Famous Relative through a common ancestor born in England in the 1600s or 1500s. Basically, if you have any lines going back to those centuries and anyone in the Famous Relatives list has a line going back to those centuries in the same country, you are most likely going to end up being related.
If none of your direct family lines go back before 1800 or if they go to a country which is not well represented in Family Search, then you are not going to show much in the way of Famous Relatives.
Getting back to Olympic medalists, if you want to know if you are related to any, just check. I just spent about five minutes going to the Olympics.com website, picking the 1920 games, picking the list of athletes, filtering by team (choosing the US), scanning the list looking for rather unique names so they would be easy to find in Family Tree if there, and checking. My first choice was not in my first attempt at searching. My second choice was and he was my 5th cousin four times removed. We are related through our common ancestors Benjamin Osborne b. 1646 and his wife Abigail Talmadge b 1649, both born in New Haven, Connecticut. I suspect that any United States Olympic medalist who has a profile in Family Tree and whose lines go back to England in the 1600s will show a relationship to me.
Just for fun, I googled "Famous Hungarians" and picked the first person on the list, Béla Viktor János Bartók. Checking for him in Family Tree, I show no relationship to him. But checking his fan chart I see that it is very limited. He does not have any ancestors listed prior to about 1725 (and none are in England) so even if he is on the list of famous people, not very many people are going to meet up on a common ancestor to him.
0 -
1725 is actually pretty early for Hungarian genealogy. During the 1600s, most of the country was too busy trying to stay alive (because Ottomans) to bother with finding paper to keep records on.
Unsurprisingly, FS doesn't show any common ancestors for me with either Bartók or his friend Kodály; the latter has some ancestors from what's now Germany, but even they peter out circa 1700, and in any case, my so-far-identified ancestors were all in Hungary. I do have a connection to Kodály: it was his suggestion that led to my spouse's grandmother incorporating music in her figure skating routines (rather than just having it as background noise, like her competitors), and she and her husband remained good friends with the composer long after she stopped competing. But that's not the sort of trivia that will ever show up in genealogical click-bait like Famous Relatives; not even the mostly-sideways "connections" on sites like Geni and WikiTree consider friendship to be at all relevant. (Rightly so, I think: can you imagine the information overload of trying to add everyone's acquaintances to a database?)
Spouse's grandmother was merely a (very early) world champion, not an Olympian. (She was Jewish. In 1908 Hungary, there were Politics around that.) But even if she were to be added to FS's list (even temporarily), I would probably not be shown as being related to her, given how the algorithm concentrates on common ancestors. Famous Relatives certainly doesn't admit any relationship between me and my father-in-law's first cousin, who as far as I know is on the usual list, being a Nobel Prize winner (and a naturalized U.S. citizen).
I agree with Mandy that you shouldn't rely on such fluff, and with Gordon that it's easy enough to search up results on your own. In any case, the answer to rutter's question is clear: FS added some Olympians to the list temporarily, but this increased the workload on the servers too much to leave them there permanently. Such is the way of online fluff.
0 -
l found all I was looking for on another site .The thing with Family search was Oh my tree changed, or it must have been a paid site. Rubbish. Yes you can find it if you look.
0 -
What site? Would be interesting to check it out.
1
