Why were several people removed from my Famous Relatives list?
When I first investigated my Famous Relative list, I noticed that John F. Kennedy, Marie Antoinette and Queen Victoria were included in the "Leaders" section of my list. I was very happy about the two ladies being there, because they represented a long suspected link (actually two) to the Stuart family of Scotland. A couple of days ago I revisited the listing only to find that Queen Victoria, Marie Antoinette, and even John F. Kennedy, were no longer listed amoung my famous ancesters. I would like to find out why they were removed, since their deletion will make it harder to trace some parts of the family tree now.
Answers
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Anna, we received your question about famous relatives list. If the names are in your Family Tree they should come up when you do your search. You might also try a different browser and see if this brings back the names, like Mozilla Fire Fox and or Google Chrome.
Results for Famous Relatives come from the information that is available to us. It could be that your family tree—or the tree of your famous relative—isn’t large enough to make a connection. Please consider signing in and adding new information so that more connections can be made.
If you have a particular relative in mind, it could also be that the person isn’t listed in our database of famous individuals. Please accept our sincere apology for leaving him or her out. In the future, we hope to implement a system where additional celebrities can be suggested.
Information about living individuals is private and likewise excluded from the activity.
Related articles
Why are there so many people from Western cultures in Famous Relatives?
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Istolk36, thank you for your comment, but these people weren't "left out" of my Famous Relative's list. They were there and then they were removed. I just want to know why. It's upsetting to me, because Marie Antoinette and Queen Victoria were both connected to my Stuart line and I've been hunting for such connections for many years. I am in the process of having my DNA tested so perhaps that will bring them back into the picture of my ancestry. Thank you again for trying to help. Take care.
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Anna, concerning those missing famous relatives. Your relationship to famous people is dependent on the relationships in Family Search. If you are now missing ancestors you were linked to before, it is because someone has unlinked your family line from the family line of that famous person.
It is possible you may discover that deleted relationship if you "surf" out to the last person that shows on your Landscape (Family tree) View in Family Search. Open their Person/Detail page and examine Latest Changes. If a relationship has been deleted the record of that change will be found in Latest Changes.
You may have to explore the end person of several lines if you do not remember how you were linked to the famous person in whom you have an interest.
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I was searching for this issue and ran across this thread. I had to take a break from genealogy for a while, and just noticed that some of my famous connections are missing. Specifically, individuals who were on the Mayflower are now missing from my famous relatives list. I was just wondering why. There could be others, but those I noticed right away.
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As Ana pointed out "Your relationship to famous people is dependent on the relationships [recorded here ] in Family Search [Family Tree]."
Note that sometimes these links (across a VERY large number of generations) between one generation and the next, can sometimes be based on (what is later) found to be an erroneous link between two people.
Even a single inter-relationship that is "disconnected" by a FS user (for various reasons - among them the belief that the relationship is in error) could result in numerous people (even to the degree of millions of people) who were previously being recorded as "related" of Person X being no longer included.
So its not like any admin took you off some list - but (one very possible scenario is ) merely that the PATH of relationship between you and the other related person - may have been broken by someone updating the database (by disconnecting a previously connected relationship)
You may wish to make your own copy of the the relationship paths between you and some of these famous people. so that even if the path of relationship is broken at any point - you have a copy of your own document that records the exact path of the relationship. and then you would be able to go back and see the precise link that was broken and analyze why it may have been broken.
Also note DNA testing results do NOT directly affect FamilySearch Family Tree links (FamilySearch has no DNA service not place for recoding DNA test results)
Though INDIRECTLY based on DNA test results individual FamilySearch users could indeed make updates to the family tree based on the interpretation of the DNA data.
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Hello, John Wayne was my cousin and now he is no longer listed under famous people why is that because I didn’t make any changes? On my mothers line there is a lot of royal people throughout Scotland, England and Ireland and Northern Ireland why are those people not listed as famous people? Why does the family tree charts only go to seven generations why not have it to ten or twelve generations just curious? On my mothers line which is atheist Daugherty to McWilliams to the Duffs and so on just that line shows a lot of people and families of royalty? lkyspgot57@aol.com. Hughie Fawcett
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This is a collaborative database -- - you are just one of millions of users, any of which could have made a change or correction in any one single interrelationship in millions of people in your ancestry and that one change can cause a "disconnect" between you and that person you were previously connected to.
As to Family Tree Charts and generations - - some developer had to pick a number . . . it just couldn't be some infinite number. They picked 7 -- which is probably the most common norm (5-7 generations) across printed forms and most genealogy applications.
Seven generations is pretty normal for default pedigree charts
keep in mind thats 2 to the power of 7 ancestral lines (128 lines) this is a reasonable/common number to show in a chart. The number keeps doubling 256, 512, 1024 every generation - really balloons
going back 20 generations you would have more than one million ancestors and think of all the processing power to do that (at the expense of all the other users of the system).
7 generation is simply the default.
also note that is for the printed charts but the dynamic chart that is at the core of navigating family tree - continues to allow you to go back as many generations as you wish - on a given set of lines but alternate lines drop off from view as you go back simply because it is designed to do such so that it optimize the limited real estate of the screen. (whats the point of showing a million (or even a thousand names) on a single screen?
As to Royalty
One could argue that anyone in royalty is famous - but once you hit a royal line with one person most all the ancestors of that one person are also royalty so again the numbers beyond that would just explode. Also Most people have to go back more than 12 generations, often much more, to hit a royal line. (probably beyond the generational limit of the famous ancestor checker) Again you have to think about all the processing power to churn through literally millions of ancestors if you go back that far.
Also if you really want to get a chart greater than 7 generations look up Relative Finder or Puzilla on the Internet.
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I just found this same sort of oddity with my lists. Using RelativeFinder.org I am able to find many more famous connections than I can with Famous Relatives on Family Search. It's really odd because they use the same login and the same family tree to make the connections. So why are the two so different? I find some hits in Famous Relatives that don't show up in Relative Finder, and I find a lot in Relative Finder that don't appear in Famous Relatives. Can I trust any of it?
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Both systems should allow you to see how you are related to these people. Whether you can trust that the links are correct is another story.
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"Should" is the key word here. In reality, they don't. Hence the confusion. Still - I do like having the tools. They really shouldn't be the go-to thing if we're doing real family history research on our lines, but they certainly bring up some interesting information we might not easily find otherwise.
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Yes - a bit of light relief. Most of the ones I have looked at rely on some very dodgy looking links.
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When you sent me a list of famous relatives, I had 30 or 31 famous leaders. Since then, over months, the list has dropped to 19. What does this mean? Were there mistakes in the family trees? Does this mean that the ones that are no longer listed are NOT relatives???
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The Famous Relatives notice is only as good as the underlying database and that is a work in progress. Don't take Famous Relatives too seriously.
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To amplify what @Chas Howell has said, often the links to famous relatives are via common ancestors many generations back. Links that far back are often not well documented and can be subjective. Someone may come along and, taking a different view, change links and bang goes one or more famous relatives. If you want to take it seriously (not recommended), take screen shots of links so that you can go back and review what happened if the link disappears.
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I used to see a lot more in famous relatives than I do now. What happened? Why?
Carl Nielsen
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Someone may have edited your family lines to correct them and removed connections to famous relatives that you were actually never related to. Or someone may have made a mistake in merging or something and accidentally pruned your lines. Best place to start looking for what happened is your fan chart. Use that to look for changes in your direct lines.
Starting with you, you can look back seven generations on the fan chart. Check the change log of each end of line person and see if any relationships were deleted recently.
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Thanks,
I hadn't considered anything like that. Makes sense. so it may even be something I did.
Carl
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This is a really fun activity. When I first discovered it, I had two famous relatives (Thomas Edison and Greta Garbo). A week later, Katherine Hepburn was added to the list. A couple of weeks ago, the list included 119 people were listed. Today, I decided to show a friend this neat feature but when I tried it, it has gone back to only two people (Greta Garbo and Babe Didrikskon). What has happened? Will this be fixed? I hope so. Although it doesn't really help with my genealogical research, it is a really fun feature that I hope you will get working again soon.
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@Murray Strome I definitely agree, the Family Relatives activity is a fun feature, but not so useful for research. I know plenty of schoolchildren that are awed when they find out that they are (however distantly) related to famous people they learned about in history class! So glad to hear you are sharing it with others.
So far as we know there have been no changes with the Famous People activity. It is possible that other users have made changes to relationships somewhere in Family Tree and that the 119 Famous Relatives results that you received were due to an incorrect relationship that someone later removed. The relationship calculator, which includes relationships through ancestors up to 15 generations back, is so broad that it can be really difficult to figure out where in your tree such a change might have been made. So, while it doesn't help you have more famous ancestors, it is good to know that other users, just like you, are helping to make the shared Family Tree as accurate as possible.
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I noticed this too. My famous relatives keep changing. Not only that, when I explore my family tree by clicking back and back, it looks different from one time to the next. This is the problem with one family tree that everyone is working on. I like to play with FamilySearch, but to keep my actual family tree accurate I use other sites to keep track. Some of them, most of them probably, let you have your own family tree that doesn't connect with anyone else's unless you want it to, by accepting a hint, for instance.
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When I signed in a couple weeks ago I had quite a few famous relatives (12). I wrote the names down, then I signed in again recently to look at the trees for common ancestors, and now there is only 5 famous relatives listed....what happened to the other 7?
Tammy Owens
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Famous Relatives is based on information connected to you via the FamilySearch family tree. It is possible that changes (corrections) were made in the tree, and your lines are no longer connected to those individuals.
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i have famous relative missing it has only been on my site a few days but suddenly gone now ?
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Please read the previous comments for explanations as to why famous relatives come and go.
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I've also recently had famous relatives disappear from my list. Having read everyone's comments and explanations, I decided to follow up on one example. Specifically, John F. Kennedy, who was listed as my 8th cousin. That's a closer relationship to me than anyone else on the list, so I was curious about the change.
I looked up John Fitzgerald Kennedy on Family Search, and then clicked the icon to see if any relationship to me was listed. Lo and behold, the relationship was mapped out, and across the top of the page were the words "Relationship to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, My 8th cousin". So in this case, no crowd-sourced changes in the records caused the relationship to disappear. Must be a glitch in the system.
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Actually, most people need to go well over 45-50 generations (or even further) back to find anything remotely royal in direct line. About 70% of people of the world have only workers and farm hands in the last 500-600 years.
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I had a issue myself. While it did list each parent, grand parent, it nolonger list the spouses, kids, or there parents and no longer lets me add to them. Why did it all disappear?
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"In 1999, the Yale statistician Joseph Chang showed that if you go back far enough – say, 32 generations, or 900 years – you’d find that everyone alive today shares a common ancestor. In Europe, where lineages have been closely studied, that ancestor was someone who lived just 600 years ago.... In other words, mathematically speaking, we’re all related to royalty." (See: https://www.theguardian.com/whats-in-your-blood-/2018/oct/11/royal-ancestry-genetics-things-to-consider )
600 years is just 15 generations.
One thing to keep in mind when looking at those Famous Relatives is that very, very few of them are direct line ancestors. Most are remote cousins such as 5th to 10th cousins multiple times removed. The connection is almost always through a common ancestor in the 1500s or 1600s.
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Hi , I had the same problem Anna, I logged in today and was thrilled to see so many new famous family. I logged out and when I returned they were all gone but one. I know you suggested trying different browser. I will try. Thank you.
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@Queen Anne boleyn You have posted this as a new discussion in Community, which existing discussion does it belong to?
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