shorthand for view my relationship

LegacyUser

Craig McPhie said: I am trying to find a more compact and spreadsheet-friendly way to document my relationships with those in my family tree. As far as I know, the only way to get this information is to click on the view my relationship option and get the graphic display. I would love as an option to see something like the ahnentafel notation that uses a binary code to show the relationship. I suppose there would need to some additional convention to show descendants of a sibling from a person's direct line. It seems like this kind of notation would allow for interesting parsing and grouping of relatives in a variety of applications.

Craig McPhie
San Diego, CA

LegacyUser

Leroy Roberts said: Please define "ahnentafel notation". I tried looking in my dictionary and I couldn't find the word.

LegacyUser

Craig McPhie said: Try doing a Google search for genealogical numbering systems
There is a good Wiki article on ahnentafel.,

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Given the nature of the massive tree, I'm not sure that the ahnentafel codes could be generated "on the fly" for your displayed ancestors. When you click view my relationship, you are working with a single person's relationship back to you.

If the code was to be used with all of the profile (or a pedigree view), it would need to generate the codes for a number of your relatives and could adversely impact system performance. I have one family that has fourteen children with four wives (a case of the wife dying after or at childbirth, and the man remarrying shortly after).

That isn't that many, but I worked with a man who was the 25th child of 25 in his family. I have no idea what it would take to generate the correct code, but I suspect it could be time consuming to work on thirty or forty persons when opening a record.

I know the descendancy chart can get bogged down if there are a lot of kids involved with each generation and four generations are displayed. Part of the problem is the growing number of profiles. Last I saw, it was over 1.2 Billion profiles, but another user on this forum mentioned 1.4 billion.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: By the way, I think this is a good idea, but for people unfamiliar with the ahnentafel method, I could see a condensed version using letters: 1C1R, 2GGM, 3C3R, and so on.

1C1R -- First cousin once removed.
2GGM -- Second Great Grandmother
3C3R -- Third Cousin three times removed (my relationship to Milton Hershey).

Maybe an adaptation of how Relative Finder generated the relationships used by that site.

LegacyUser

Craig McPhie said: I agree that this would be a bit much in a general view. I was just thinking that there may be a useful way to generate the notation for a single relationship when selecting view my relationship--or for example, the relationships for those names reserved for temple ordinances.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Actually, there is, but not with FamilySearch. I use Ancestral Quest and it and two other fully certified family tree management programs (Legacy and Roots Magic) have the ability to download the ancestral lines of a person and their descendants. From there, the programs can generate the ahnentafel code and drop in into place on each person's record. The free versions may be suitable for doing this, as well.

Here is a screen shot of the tool in Ancestral Quest. The other two programs should have similar capabilities.

I use the FS ID, but this feature provides several other options for code display.