Calculate ALL relations and report
Hello, I just began using your software, and wanted to highlight these CRITICAL issues..., which I'm hoping you will be able to address immediately!
1. The software is unable to report the following relations (examples):
- A is B's sisters husband's (ie. brother-in-law's) brother
- A is B's wife's sister's husband's (ie. co-brother's) father
2. I've not reached that stage yet - but, I'd expect the software to be able to report multiple relations if exists. Eg: If A and B are paternal cousins, AND, also if they are co-brothers. Does it do it today ?
To me these are IMPORTANT, and very simple and straight forward relations that people would generally recall, and really look to be reported by a leading software like FamilySearch.
Comments
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@Padmakumar Welcome to FamilySearch!
You'll find what you want in Relative Finder, a free third-party program, in the Solutions Gallery.
I think you may have missed the critical point that the FamilySearch Family Tree is a collaborative tree for all, not a private tree program. With over 1 billion profiles, calculating every possible relationship from every user to every profile would bring the site to a screeching halt.
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Characterizing a website as "software" is sufficiently odd that I'm wondering what you're actually using/doing.
The "show relationship" feature on FamilySearch's Family Tree is limited to showing your relationship to a profile or user, and it only does that within 15 generations (I think) and only on direct lines: it does not consider your in-laws to be your relatives. FS is highly unlikely to use its limited resources to expand this feature, especially given that there is a third-party site that uses FS's tree data to show a greater variety of relationships: RelativeFinder (https://www.relativefinder.org/#/start). However, RF's definition of "relative" is considerably stricter than yours: an in-law's sibling's in-laws very definitely do not qualify. That's a connection, not a relationship, and I do not know of a site that generates connection paths from FS's data.
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The Family Tree is built upon exactly two types of relationships, which are the building blocks for drawing all trees: a couple relationship between 2 people (generally spouses), or a parent-child relationship between a child and 1 or 2 parents. There's no simple relationship between a brother and sister, but rather the brother has a parent-child relationship to the parents(s), and the sister has a parent-child relationship to the same parent(s), and a sibling relationship can be derived from those two relationships.
More complex relationships such as the ones you listed are simply combinations of these. For example, "A is B's sisters husband's (ie. brother-in-law's) brother"
- B has a parent-child relationship to B-father and B-mother.
- C is B's sister because she also has a parent-child relationship to B-father and B-mother.
- C has a couple relationship to her husband, D.
- D has a parent-child relationship to D-father and D-mother.
- A also has a parent-child relationship to D-father and D-mother, and thus is D's brother.
- All the above results in "A is B's sisters husband's (ie. brother-in-law's) brother"
There is also a much less specific type of relationship called "Other Relationship" for which one of the types is Relative. Where exact couple and parent-child relationships can be known, it's best to use those, since they are used by FamilySearch in drawing trees and calculating more complex relationships. But if all you know is that two people are related and you don't know those building blocks relationships, you can use an Other Relationship.
Every cousin or other complex relationship can be derived from these two simple building block relationship types. Family Tree calculates your relationship to a person by finding a common ancestor, perhaps with a couple relationship at the beginning or end of the relationship chain. It shows only the closest such relationship when you choose View Relationship, but you are welcome to travel through the tree to establish any complicated relationship you'd like.
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As another user of Family Tree, I'd like to say welcome to the website and that I hope you have lot of fun using it. Also, welcome to this community of users. Since this is your first post here, I'll just mention that these forums have two uses.
First of all, we have been assured that all posts here do get seen by the developers. However, they are busy and rarely post comments about our ideas. So view this as a box you drop a piece of paper into that you never see again and never get an answer to. Critically important changes suggested by uses have been made to this massive and extremely complex website in the past. These changes usually take 2 to 5 years.
Secondly, this a a place for our suggestions to be critiqued, refined, clarified, and improved by other users. This is a valuable process for the programmers because they can see all sides of a idea from the viewpoint of multiple users. This does mean that we sometimes have to have a bit of a thick skin and be able to accept criticism of an idea without taking it as criticism of oneself.
Regarding Family Tree's current abilities, the only relationships it can currently calculate is the one closest blood or adoptive relationship between a person in Family Tree and the user within fifteen generations. Due to the massive size of the database, this is at the cost of tremendous amounts of computer power which is why it is only checked when the View Relationship link is clicked. It took the programmers years to develop a way to do this without crashing the site every time such relationship checking was tried. To expand this to non-biological relationships such as brothers-in-law would take even more processing time. I have to say that I have never seen this before. Is there stand alone software or other online platforms that do offer this?
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@Gordon Collett, to your final question: yes, both WikiTree and Geni offer some version of a "connection finder".
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