Enhance View My Relationship feature

LegacyUser

James Philip Nash said: Please consider adding a cousin calculation feature to View My Relationship, that also displays the relationship in words. View My Relationship is an awesome feature, but sometimes it can be hard to put into words ones relationship to an ancestor. Thank you.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This feature is very limited at the present time and it is likely to be a while before it is extended beyond the current three of four generations now included. There are other more pressing needs that need to be addressed first, including retiring nFS and addressing issues that could not be addressed while nFS records were still being integrated into Family Tree.

Right now, the best method is to use Relative Finder and create a personal group into which you can add people in Family Tree to discover the relationship between you and those people. https://www.relativefinder.org/#/main

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: See the discussion at https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... where this same request was made.

LegacyUser

Robert Hickling said: An idea for an extra devlopment: Enhance the tool to check whether two individuals on the database are related.

And if they are related, to show how they are related, by displaying a small tree segment.

Like the existing "View my Relationship" tool, but between any two individuals on the system.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Use Relative Finder, a free tool from BYU labs that not only can determine the relationship between two people, but it can download the chart in PDF form for sending to others. https://relativefinder.org/#/main -- more information can be found in the Solutions Gallery.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I've certainly been there :-) Here are a few thoughts:

This has been requested before, and I believe I heard somewhere that in certain places it is available on the mobil apps.

The graphic of the View My Relationship is actually more accurate than the text descriptions. That is because it shows actual people in the lineages. Our english terminology for these relationships are more suited for just describing the blood relationships we have with our relatives (i.e., the actual reason WHY they are our relatives).

For example, if I am talking about my "2nd Cousin once removed", what exactly am I describing? I have many "2nd Cousins once removed" but on the View My Relationship chart, many would appear totally different! Our common shared ancestor might be one of my 4 sets of Great Grandparents or it could be one of my 8 sets of Great Great Grandparents! Because of this ambiguity, describing your relationship in an accurate text equivalent to the tree is rather difficult, whereas just describing your blood type relationship is a lot easier.

So what you might like to explore is exactly what the text terms mean (e.g., sibling, Father, cousin, in-law, uncle, aunt, etc.). It's not real hard and once you get it, it becomes much easier to just look at the tree and count the distance to the common ancestor. Start with this:



The other reason that this gets tricky is when you go into different cultures or languages. The structure used to define relationships can be totally different from the english ones we use. As an international tool, FS would need to deal with the different ways relative naming occurs in other languages. It is not a word for word translation. Here's a fun example:

https://youtu.be/nCFRoILS1jY

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: For example, Dutch does not have the terminology for different sorts of cousins. The same word "neef"- the root for our nephew, means a nephew or any sort of cousin no matter how distant.

When MyHeritageDNA translated their English interface into Dutch, they had to invent new terms. They called a first cousin "a cousin of the first grade", and so on.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yea, that is the extreme opposite to the Chinese world where every relative has a single unique terminology for the relationship

Tanya B Harvey

It would be really great if we could choose another genealogical path that shows how we're related to people. Lately, I've found two relatives uploading things for my paternal grandfather's family and when I click to see our connection, it takes me back ten or more generations on my mother's side instead. It's a small world, but I'd like to see what the other path is.

genthusiast

@Tanya B Harvey You can see other relational paths using BYU FHL Relative Finder:

https://www.relativefinder.org/#/main