Issue with Relationship Viewer
I'm running into some issues with viewing relationships on FamilySearch.
Often, it won't load the relationship. This is what appears:
Then later on, seemingly at random, it ends up loading properly. This often happens if I manage to load a different relationship on another tab and then go back. The system lags just a little before successfully loading it, but is pretty quick when it fails, making me think that perhaps the previous example comes from it just skipping the process of finding the relationship somehow.
It's also worth noting that the relationship viewer will sometimes show completely different lines to the same ancestor. This was pulled up from an ancestor's name on the home page:
…and this is from the same individual's profile page just seconds later:
When backing out from the relationship on the profile and with the relationship still pulled up on the home page, the relationship changes to match the home page version. There seems to be a great deal of randomness involved here.
Today is the first time I've encountered this. This doesn't appear to be intended behavior. It's also pretty intermittent, so I don't know how easily it can be replicated.
Answers
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There have been some issues with View My Relationship. Family Search is aware and working to correct the issues. Thanks for your patience.
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You’re definitely not imagining things—the discrepancy between the home page widget and the individual’s profile page usually happens when the system serves a cached relationship path in one view while attempting a live graph calculation in another. When the server times out under heavy load, it often fails instantly or falls back to an older cached path.
Since the engineering team is currently working on a fix, here are a few quick workarounds that can help in the meantime:
Hard Refresh the Page: Use Ctrl + F5 (Windows) or Cmd + Shift + R (Mac) when the viewer fails to load. This forces a fresh server request instead of reading from broken local cache.
Avoid Multiple Relationship Tabs: Running the viewer on several tabs simultaneously can trigger rate limits or cause session conflicts between calculations.
Copy the PID Directly: If the home page shortcut glitches, copy the person’s ID (PID) and trigger the relationship lookup directly from their main profile page.
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