Automatically show all related.

LegacyUser

David Burns said: When working on descendants we add many spouses that may be related through a different family line. However we do not know they are related until we either work on that line or click on my relationship. I would like some way to see that I am related or not to every person I view on the person page. This would get more people working on lines they did not know they had.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: With over 1.2 Billion profiles in the massive tree?

With the number of people who use FamilySearch, this request would quickly use up computing resources.

Maybe it is doable, but there is a better solution: one of the three fully-certified family tree management programs. Even the free versions of these programs have the ability to download your ancestral lines into a local (to you) database.

LegacyUser

David Burns said: Please tell me where I can find those three programs.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: They are available in the solutions gallery, which has a link at the bottom of this and most FamilySearch.org pages. Once on the Solutions Gallery page, go down and expand the Family Tree Management section.

The three fully certified versions are Ancestral Quest, Legacy, and Roots Magic.

Each of these three has a free version for you to try before you decide which one you like the best. Legacy is limited to Windows computers, while Ancestral Quest and Roots Magic have Mac versions. Only Roots Magic has Android and iOS (mobile devices) versions.

Many people find that the free version is effective for what they want to use the program for.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: https://partners.familysearch.org/sol...

Shows most of the genealogy desktop and mobile programs that interface with Family Tree.

However, I'm not sure this would help much, though, because first you would have to download all family lines for all the spouse back far enough to fine any relationship. When searching for relationships, Family Tree goes back either 12 or 15 generations, I don't remember which. In any event, to do this on your desktop would, I'm afraid, quickly overwhelm you system.

Just to expand a bit on Tom's answer, I see that you have been on this board since 2010 so you may already be familiar with the history of the View My Relationship function. Many people requested just the basic function we have now many, many times over the past years. Every time the answer from FamilySearch was that that would like to but it would take so much in the way of computer resources that it would slow to system to a crawl for everyone.

After many years, however, their software engineers developed a way to do this and produced what we enjoy now. One thing they did to preserve resources was to make the feature function on request only rather than automatically.

Now, keeping in mind that FamilySearch has to keep the website functioning all over the world and that there are 13.9 million registered users of Family Tree and that descendancy charts can get very big even if set at the commonly used size of 4 generations (I just checked one random ancestor and there were thirty spouses on a chart that size), if every time someone somewhere in world loaded or did something that causes a refresh of a descendancy chart the web site had to go back 15 generations on all lines for all spouses then go back that far on the user that loaded the page then look for common ancestors, the computational load would be tremendous.

So, anyway, the feature you suggest would be a fun and potentially useful addition to Family Tree, but I suspect it would be a very low priority since the hurdles are high and we can get the information now if we really want it with not all they many clicks.

LegacyUser

David Burns said: Thank you for your explinations.

LegacyUser

Richard M. Smith said: When I am working on a line, I frequently click on the father of the wife or husband of the relative. Sometimes, I find a new line, or one of my wife's lines. In the 9th generation, each of us has 256 FAMILY lines, and that doubles every generation earlier. Plenty to do.
Dick Smith