Relationship Viewer is often wrong in calculating my relationships - Is it being re-engineered?
I enjoy using the Relationship Viewer 😀 but it does not seem to always use the algorithm established in the following documentation and is often wrong🤨:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/cousin-chart
https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/what-is-a-second-cousin
Corollary question: If it is regularly wrong across multiple users, would it not be better to suspend it until it works properly🚑️?
Answers
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Relationship viewing is a key element of Family Tree. It would be completely impractical to suspend it. It had some glitches back in December and January, but in my experience, it works fine now. I certainly see no support for your claim that "it is regularly wrong across multiple users." If you have a specific example of it working incorrectly, you should report it to Support.
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In case this helps, it's also entirely possible that there will be a delay before changes to the Tree are reflected in the relationship calculator.
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If you have found a bug in the relationship viewer, that's great! It's users reporting unexpected and undiscovered quirks in routines that can really help the program improve. However, the developers can't do anything about a problem if they cannot determine what the specific problem is.
You state the relationship viewer is wrong in calculating relationships but then state that the algorithm used doesn't match the help article's explanation. So it is not really clear what problem you are seeing.
Is the chart produced by the relationship viewer incorrect? Are you seeing parent to child connections that do not exist in Family Tree? Can you post images, with living people's information blocked out that show a specific example of this? That would be a major bug in the routine that I would think would be a high priority to fix.
Again looking at just the relationship chart, are you finding times that you can manually find a shorter path between you and another person in Family Tree that goes back to a more recent most recent common ancestor? Posting an example of the generated chart and your manual chart would be needed as an illustration of problem or would be needed to explain why you are seeing the difference.
Or, since you post links to a cousin chart, are you just seeing times when the terms used to describe the relationship are off such as calling a third cousin what you think should be a fourth cousin? Posting the full chart and its heading would be the best demonstration that there is a problem whether in the routine or in your counting.
There is also the possibility that the help center article is just badly worded in some way. What part of its description doesn't match what you are observing?
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Here is the type of detail the programmers need to fix any problem you are seeing. In this example, the relationship viewer is working just fine. All the parent-child relationships are just what they should be and counting out manually or using the cousin chart you link to shows that the textual description of the relationship is correct:
(Click on the image to enlarge it if necessary.)
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From the new homepage, where do I go to find the Relationship Viewer? I didn't even know this existed, thanks for the screenshot sample above. 😊
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It is in the top banner section of every profile page under the person's name and between View Tree and Following. It is also on every person's summary card where it is the little squiggle next to the star you click to follow someone.
You can also check your relationship to other users by clicking on the user's name. If they have relationship viewing turned on, the relationship will b stated there and if you click on that, the chart will open.
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 , the relationship viewer is found in connection to a person. The primary place you find it is by clicking on the View Relationship button in the header of any person page
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@Alan E. Brown and @Gordon Collett Thanks, you guys are awesome. I've used View before but never clicked to open the chart with the labels😊
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First, thank you to all who so politely responded to my initial post😃.
Second, I must apologize for seemingly jumping to a conclusion about the accuracy of Relationship Viewer - I now believe I was wrong🐏. I felt certain that I had read, re-read, and re-re-read the algorithm so thoroughly that I could not possibly be wrong - that's when I posted my question. As it turns out, I must obviously need to read and practice some things more than 3 times before I become so sure of myself🔎.
Third, I very much appreciate the very descriptive nature some respondents used to help me see the error of my ways.
Lastly, I am glad some viewers learned about the existence of the Relationship Viewer, misguided as my post was.
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