I searched my relationship to George Washington and it said he was my 7th Cousin, 10x removed . . .
and now I don't see it when I look it up . . . what changed?
Answers
-
@Stuart1208 Hi, welcome to FamilySearch Community. It is impossible to specifically answer your question without a lot more detail and research. However, in general, this is what has happened. A relationship of 7th cousins, 10x removed means that you share a common ancestor. In your case, this common ancestor was a 6th great-grandparent to George Washinton and a 16th (10 times removed) great-grandparent to you. A 6th great-grandparent to George Washington would be someone born around 1550. What has happened is that either your line back to that common ancestor, or George Washington's line back to that common ancestor has been changed. Perhaps both lines have been changed. Nevertheless, a change(s) has been made that has removed either or both your connection or George Washington's connection to the common ancestor noted when you first looked at the relationship.
To answer specifically what happened, you would need to know the common ancestor that showed when you first looked at this. Then you would have to check both your line and George Washington's line back to that common ancestor and see what changed.
Hope this helps.
0 -
Out of curiosity, I looked in George Washington's Tree View (Portrait) and expanded his ancestors back 8 generations. He has about 111 6th great-grandparents in the tree. That doesn't include possible alternative parents. If you don't know who your nearest common ancestors were at the time you saw this relationship (PIDs or names), it would be a mammoth task to find out what happened.
1 -
Family Tree relative tracing is only ever as good as the information in the Tree (ever varying, and of quality varying from excellent to lousy), so any level of faith in the information it shows on a particular day for any speculative relationship of this sort is unwise.
As of today FT thinks he is my 6C8R, but who knows what it will say tomorrow?
Also he has at least two profiles.
0 -
Common DIRECT or Common INDIRECT?? I can't have a common DIRECT because he had no kids so . . . Custis, perhaps??
0 -
I have 25 names from my mom to him . . . Colemans, Lees, Fergusons, Barkers, Waltons, Mays, Dickens, Twigdens and then Washington . . . not that many names actually . . .
0 -
@Stuart1208 - there is no such thing as a Common Indirect Ancestor. Washington having no children makes no difference to any common (direct) ancestor for him and you. The children and the ancestors are in opposite directions. It's simply that he had a load of ancestors; you have a load of ancestors and somewhere there is at least one crossover between the two lines. And potentially more.
1 -
What I do find mildly interesting, is that when I try the link for Famous Relatives, I get a list of images (no George Washington for me, but I do get Katherine Hepburn, which I feel is a good swap) - however, I find that some of the images don't connect to a relative. This suggests to me that my list of Famous Relatives is updated only every so often but the actual visible tree linkages are updated more frequently - probably in real time, whenever I attempt to follow up a Famous Relative. This would make sense, because trawling through the full FamilyTree looking for all Famous People and seeing whether they are related to me, is liable to need intensive processing. So the lost FR in my case was related X days ago, then someone updated something that broke the connection between then and now.
0 -
I viewed my Washington relationship by searching for him in the Tree, not via Famous Relatives, which I have now tried, giving the same result (6C8R), but via an almost entirely different route.
2 -
My relationship to GW is pretty stable - he's always there near the top when I look at my list of FM. But, I'm from the US, with deep colonial roots. Whether it's fact I'm not sure as it goes back a few generations beyond what I can prove.
Oh - @Adrian Bruce1 - Katharine Hepburn is on my list of FR, too.
0 -
I've got her too!
0
