Other Relationships Section on the New Person Page
Just a quick announcement about other relationship section. We just turned on the feature for your review.
What do you think?
What do you like?
How can we improve?
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Love it!!
will the feature also show in Family Tree App?? (Please 🙂)
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I would suggest a “Legal” or Court category for relationships like executors, witnesses, property, lawsuits etc
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Other potential categories:
School/Education — could include teacher/student & classmates
Friend—not necessarily the same as neighbor
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Interesting new feature. From comments in Community, the slave holder/enslaved may get the most use.
Will just mention here that upon clicking the Switch Roles link in the popup edit box, the background page scrolls to the very top of the page.
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Oh, and thank you for putting this after the Family Members section and not with the Other Information section. That does seem the best place for it.
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I will use this quite a bit. Some of my ancestors were enslavers and I can now bring that out into searchable status with the names of the enslaved. One ancestor had a business ledger with all his bulk transaction clients listed by name, town, items or service purchased and exact dates. Transactions range 1832 - Civil War. I have 1920s high school sports teams listed by name, 1920s graduating class names listed on programs, I have 2 autograph albums, one dated during the Civil War and the other the 1880s. I will try my best to connect all of these names to my ancestors. FINALLY a good way to do this other than a tag in a photo memory. THANK YOU
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The change log filter shows an other relationship type not available in the drop-down menu.
This would be very useful for some users
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I did find the Emancipation option when I edited the Enslavement fact
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I created a person connected by slavery to a brother of a direct ancestor of mine. I had to create a person to do it. I then added the will as a source which references this boy. The will source is tagged for location and birth, but after I had created the birth vital, it still said 0 sources. If I create a vital "birth" and have a source tagged "birth" why doesn't it automatically connect? I had to edit the birth information and manually add the source. I hope this is NOT the way it will work in the future!
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Gail, are you sure you were on the correct profile's Sources tab when you tagged the birth?
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What is the purpose of this field? All biological relationships are already on the tree, I see no purpose in linking to anyone not biologically related to someone as these people have nothing to do with someone's ancestry.
How many people are going to make irrelevant links here to important people that will be incredibly difficult to validate let alone maintain?
Employer / employee relationships are likely to get wildly out of control if say someone worked for Henry Ford. So is Henry Ford's profile is going to have tens of thousands of employees attached?
This section needs to be removed as it serves no useful purpose.
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Julia Szent-Györgyi Yes, I was on the enslaved profile. I added the source and tagged it with birth and location (and now that I look, I also added the tag "name"), then I created the birth fact in Vitals. In case you want to look at it, enslaved is GFQH-DNY, enslaver is KNH6-JQX.
CESchultz What is the purpose of the Other Relationship? It is to provide more information about our ancestors, and also provide information about other people's ancestors that we may hold in our hands. This is a world tree intended to show all connections, not just biological. Documenting all known connections to a person, be it adoptive parents, step parents, half siblings, foster siblings has already been enabled. It is HIGH TIME there was a formal way to begin documenting other relationships, such as enslaved. African American genealogy is fraught with difficulties and indignities, and having no way to formally tie known ancestors to those who kept them in bondage has been a long time coming. Now we wait to see if other ancestry sites take this bold lead and follow suit. As to your Henry Ford profile, I have this exact situation. I inherited a business ledger which I have been digitizing. It documents wholesale transactions of goods and services from 1832 to the Civil War. I now know who owned it (a direct ancestor) and the store for which it was a record. I have been adding the images and tagging them in the memories of those people who I researched and found in FamilySearch. I will now be able to add a long list of business connections using this feature which will enable anyone to see at a glance my ancestor's business network. You can't do that with only memories. I have other such connections as well. I have the list of fellow nursing students who graduated with my grandmother from nursing school in 1922. I have my other grandmother's list of 1924 championship basketball players she idealized. She recorded names, their positions and nicknames on the back of a team photo. I think most poignantly, I have the name of a civil war soldier who died and a photo of a poem he wrote to the sister of a direct ancestor. The page is framed with black ribbon. At the time of his death, both were 22. She never married. This will be the most precious connection I will make using Other Relationships to show a probable marriage that never took place. I continue to marvel at people who do not think information about our ancestors is relevant unless it is visible on a pedigree chart.
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@Gail Swihart Watson this section can get wildly out of control and become totally nonsensical. Again Henry Ford did a lot of business dealings with tens of thousands of people are we to attach all of those people to him to see his "business network"?
What about neighbors? How is that defined? It is houses adjacent, houses on the same street, houses in same arbitrary "neighborhood", houses in the same zip code? How does this work in a city or apartment buildings?
That section is going to be used for gibberish nonsense and waste massive amounts of storage space and processing time.
What happens when someone incorrectly attaches the business ledger from the wrong Henry Ford to the well known Henry Ford to 10,000 different people? Who is going to correct that?
What document verifies that someone is a "friend" and not someone they knew the name of?
What does it matter if two people lived next to each other as "neighbors" for a short time but never talked to or knew the other person even existed? Say someone famous stayed with a relative for a short time and used their address for say a parcel delivery on record, now people will claim their ancestors were "neighbors" of said famous person which can be largely irrelevant and nonsensical.
I have lived in the suburbs my entire life and in the eight homes I have resided, I never knew who the people were who lived behind me on a different street even though our homes were in some cases less than an acre apart from each other. This becomes even more irrelevant in areas where people owned hundreds of acres of property.
People will abuse this section to make any irrelevant link to someone famous.
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@CESchultz, yes, people can do bad things with good tools. That doesn't make the tools bad.
Have you heard about the genealogy "FAN (club) principle"? It stands for Friends, Associates, and Neighbors, and it can be a crucial tool for breaking down brick walls. (Another name for it is "cluster research".) The new "Other Relationships" section should be an excellent tool for doing this kind of research.
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CESchultz You are right it COULD get out of hand, but I'm not sure what that means. Your example of Henry Ford's page having 4000 names attached who worked in his factory probably is out of hand. I dare say that would take thousands of hours, and someone trying to do that would be working from a document, book or other source which could just be added and tagged with -gasp - 4000 tags. Most people will not add neighbors unless they have genealogical information about them - which I am sitting on a ton of such information. I have no idea whether there will be very many irrelevant links. An irrelevant link is one which gives no information, and is there really such a thing? For some of my ancestors I have every city directory where they lived attached as a source. Now to some that may seem irrelevant and overkill, but I have my reasons for those persons. It is for a power point display of photos of homes lived in by our ancestors then (from photos in my inherited scrapbooks), and Google maps images of the homes now. Irrelevant?
What is more likely to happen will be very beneficial, and the slavery option is the MOST beneficial. Adding the enslaved is quite a leap forward in making unsearchable records searchable. There are LOTS of wills and estate inventories listing the partial (and sometimes full) names of enslaved, and there has not really been a good way to bring them out as people connected to their enslavers. Other web sites and Facebook pages have been created to enable connecting enslavers and enslaved for descendants, as well as to document parent-child relationships of enslaved that appear in many records. Wills also mention an enslaved mother with her enslaved children. Now FamilySearch has a fabulous way to establish the records that reflect the slavery relationship and family groups of the enslaved, when documented. I cannot see how anyone could think this is a step backwards and needs to be eliminated.
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To be more up front about the possible abuse of other relationships, there are limits on the number of each relationship type that can be created. We put these limits in place so that only relationships that are genealogically relevant are added. For instance not just any neighbor, but a neighbor with wich they moved or shows up in their will or on an obituary or who’s children married their children, etc…
Here are the current other relationship limits. These may be adjusted by familySearch as need or abuse arises.
Apprenticeship. 50
Employment 50
Godparent 50
Household 50
Neighbor 50
Relative 20
Slavery 200
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lyleblunttoronto1 It's too bad you don't offer an "other". The business ledger I inherited records transactions of bulk goods and services that supported my ancestor's general store. I hope to show that named people sold him bulk quantities of wheat, oats, etc. which he turned around and sold. That isn't exactly an employment relationship. It's close enough that it's what I'm going to use, but it's not quite accurate. Here is an example. Note I have figured out who the 2 people mentioned are and have them tagged. https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/123627920?cid=mem_copy
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There is talk about adding "association" to the list. We are waiting to see what the user experience is with these and if there are enough valid use cases to justify it.
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@lyleblunttoronto1 so only the first 50 people who create the association can be employees of Henry Ford?
What happens when 50 people in a "neighborhood" add themselves in first before someone's next door neighbor gets the chance?
How does someone have 50 godparents?
This section is a horrible idea and will just add gibberish nonsense to the family tree.
The slavery option is very dangerous as what happens when people with similar names get falsely accussed of being slave owners? I could see people threatening lawsuits over that sort of thing.
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@Gail Swihart Watson How are "neighbors" defined? It is houses adjacent, houses on the same street, houses in the same arbitrary "neighborhood", houses in the same zip code? How does this work in a city or apartment buildings?
No one answered this: What does it matter if two people lived next to each other as "neighbors" for a short time but never talked to or knew the other person even existed? Say someone famous stayed with a relative for a short time and used their address for say a parcel delivery on record, now people will claim their ancestors were "neighbors" of said famous person which can be largely irrelevant and nonsensical.
Keeping track of where your ancestors lived can obviously be important but unfortunately city directies are largely redundant and mostly a waste of time unless they contain a different address not found on another record. So for someone who never moved in 30 years, having 30 city directories listing the same address is nonsensical. I see no problem with keeping a list of all of your ancestor's addresses and pictures of their actual homes but having Google photos of current homes that are not the ones they lived in is meaningless.
In my experience, most people add things without any genealogical information to support it.
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CESchult If I can identify friends of my ancestors in photos I have and find their records in ancestry, I certainly tag the image with that PID. I personally don't think I would connect the 2 person accounts using the other relationship unless I am on the trail to find how two families are connected for some reason. That can (and has) happened, and I have seen census records which have relationships implied between families that I am curious to research. I will definitely use it for several other relationship types, and slavery is one of them. I will also use employment as I have some business records I inherited.
Your comment about the slavery relationship being dangerous is pretty over the top and I'm curious why someone hasn't removed it. It is a borderline violation of the code of conduct.
Right now, attaching sources containing information about enslaved doesn't really result in something searchable for the descendants of the enslaved. Remember, a primary purpose of this site is to enable collaboration between users, and the new relationships feature takes this collaborative ability to a whole new level by allowing new relationship types. Also remember, we should be inputting data accurately to the best of our knowledge, and with the new tool, there is expanded room for accuracy. It is accurate that we create new people records and create a relationship when sources imply that people and the relationship existed.
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@CESchultz, you're asking to get rid of the screwdriver because it could be misused as a weapon.
My 3ggf had 16 godparents. I haven't researched how many godchildren he had, but I can imagine that a popular person in that time and place could easily end up with well over 50 godparental relationships. This doesn't mean that I see any reason to enter all of those relationships, however, so the limit is fine where it is.
Yes, like any tool, the new Other Relationships section could be misused or abused. So could anything else, such as "alternate name" (filled with every possible spelling variation of every possible nickname) or "custom fact" (which could theoretically be used to enter every business associate from an address book, for example). Do you want to get rid of those sections, too?
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I don't see myself rushing to input details in the Other Relationships section, just as I have never used Life Sketch. But if other users find merit in its introduction, seeing some beneficial aspects, I'm perfectly happy with letting them utilise the options it provides.
In the past I've been told I misuse "Discussions", and shouldn't add so much detail in the "Reason This Information Is Correct" fields under the Vitals. What might suit me certainly won't suit the way many others choose to work within Family Tree. As suggested, "misuse" (in itself a subjective term) of its features is not the fault of the providers, who seem genuinely trying to provide tools to open the scope for users (if they so wish) to record otherwise "not-so-obvious" connections between one person and another.
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Paul W your comment made me smile. People who want all the various text fields used in uniform ways according to strict rules have their heart in the right place. But that's not how a wiki environment works. We all get comfortable with our own methods, and that freedom should be respected. It is CLEAR that many people like Life Sketch. You clearly like Discussions and Reason this information is correct. I hope we all are generous at allowing everyone to use FamilySearch tools any way we want. The argument that Life Sketch should be moved to the bottom because only unimportant information is appropriate to go there is what has been proposed. Any useful information is "hijacking" it. I say you should continue to use Discussions and Reason This Information is Correct the way you want. If discussions and notes become more visible, I will start putting comments in there, but otherwise I will continue putting comments in Life Sketch. While you do not see any use for Other Relationships, I predict this feature will have growing popularity and in fact, will be copied in environments like Ancestry. There is a dire need to document slavery relationships, in particular.
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I suspect the Other Relationship feature will be greeted with open arms by people who have been annoyed for years that if you put a Guardianship relationship as a parent-child relationship, then View My Relationship will use that path if the closest relationship between people goes though that line.
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Gordon Collett It's why I kind of never believe the results in view my relationship. I've never really understood what it does with a step relationship, if that has been documented, or how it uses preferred spouse if that conflicts with the presumed blood line. Lots seems to be going on.
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I'm late to the party but I hope it's okay that I comment in this thread anyway.
I'm a fan of the FAN approach (fun play on words) so I see value in the Other Relationships feature. I'll often find my ancestors listed on a ship registry with people who share the same last name and who appear to have come from the same area as my ancestors. It seems likely that they are related and while researching their travel partners, I'll find clues about my ancestors but I'm often not able to find documentation to support my suspicion that they are related. I've shared this connection in the Like Sketch (Herman and Augusta same-last-name immigrated with August and Henriette same-last-name, including ID numbers for the latter two) but it's rather clunky, especially since there's no way to hyperlink to those profiles.
However, I've discovered that none of the options offered fit this situation. Are you still considering other choicies? If so, would you consider "Immigration" ("Travel partner"?) and "Potential Relative?" Thanks!
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Could you please add Business Partners to the list of other relationships? This comes in particularly helpful when researching within newspapers and legal documents. For example, Thomas Stephen Dibble M11N-T26 and Harvey Tobias Zavitz 9Z68-DJR were business partners who owned a garage together. I can connect them by tagging both in the same memories, but it would be much more beneficial to be able to link them on the details screen through the other relationship category. I work with a local historical society, and this feature (to link business partners) would greatly benefit our work.
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@HESM I've added Business Partner to a consider adding list.
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