When starting a conversation about sharing Genealogy information with a distant cousin, I often want to set a frame of reference for our genetic connection.
I could send a Deep Connections capture… But it is confusing that it stops at siblings without showing the common ancestors.
Currently, I prefer to copy our 2 Pedigree Gramplet data. Then prune those trees back to reveal the mutual connection… leaving the Spouse as well as the direct lines of descendants. (Because it is hard to navigate blended families without that.)
That’s a LOT of work. So if I need something quick, I might jump over to FamilySearch & capture a ‘View my Relationship’ screen.
But I’d really like something that clearly attractively illustrates simple binary Ahnentafel (aka Atree) in the Chart view. FamilySearch apparently has one like that too. (Although I’m not certain how to access it. Nor why there’s a weird jog in the top generation of the sample appended)
If it could show multiple Atrees simultaneously, that would be better. Particularly, if it was possible to show the branching of (multiple) cousin Atrees at a mutual common ancestor marriage.
Optionally, the ability to show diverging Atrees associated with Pedigree collapse would be helpful. (Charts of “I am my own cousin”.) So, for an Ancestor that has more than 1 Ahnentafel number for a particular descendant, chart each of those Ahnentafel paths side-by-side.
I imagine you’re familiar with WikiTree’s Relationship Finder tool, which is not as graphical but seems like it would still be useful. Have you tried it, and if so, what do you consider to be its pros and cons?
I regularly am given ‘hint’ information online with indistinct relationships to myself or a specific ancestor.
Examples:
my ancestor is their 3rd great-grandfather
generic Atree description ( for Mary Norris Allerton, the 11th g-grandmother in the Atree illustration above, XMFFFFMFFMMMMM would be her Atree identifier. Her Ahnentafal number would be 12447.) I might have inverted the XFMMMMFMMFFFFF as XMFFFFMFFMMMMM… since I can never remember if the F stands for Female or Father while the M could be Male or Mother. (My preference is to use gender symbols to eliminate that ambiguity.X♀♂♂♂♂♀♂♂♀♀♀♀♀ ) However, I do know that any odd numbered Ahnentafel ancestor is always a Female.
It’d be lovely if we had a Chart that printed a worksheet with the Active Person & designated common Ancestor with blank boxes (as defined by the Atree or Ahnentafel descriptor) adjacent to my (Home Person) Atree chart to the designated common Ancestor.
Here’s what WikiTree generates for the same relationship as the ‘View my Relationship’ in FamilySearch. It is nice that the pasted data retains the hotlinks. But the indenting is dropped by most posting software. And even the indented original is less intuitive the FamilySearch chart.
The drawback to both the online systems is that you cannot put in Research Placeholders into the trees. In my system, I can add persons/relationships marked as ‘hypothetical’ to make the feature work. Then delete the relationship. I had to add 3 missing generations to the WikiTree database to reveal the relationship between cousins.
I thought you had it right the first time (assuming Father and Mother for F and M), but anyway, it reminded me of something else. I’m sure that you most other readers here realize that the identifier is simply the number converted to base two, and the digits changed to F’s and M’s, but I also found that it can be useful to sort a list of ancestors by the left-justified base two value (or F/M string), padding on the right with either spaces or with a value higher than 1 (or M); the results are different but both sorts can be useful.
Well… I’ve gotten a LITTLE more efficient method since starting this Ideas thread at the beginning of the year. I can use a combination of Rules, Tags, export to GEDCOM and graphing with yEd. It is awkward but marginally workable.
The RelationshipPathBetween ruleis close but would be more interactive if the rule was based on the RelationshipPathBetween ActivePerson and HomePerson, included the reference people and included the Primary parents of the persons…
In the Person view, this comes pretty close. Since it is simply a table of people, it lists the people but loses the Relationship perspective. Sorting on birthdate helps a little.
I had expected the Rule to be similar to Deep Connection… where it stops short of the Common Ancestors and only shows the siblings. If that had been the case, the IsParentOfFilterMatch rule wouldn’t include an extraneous generation at the top. Instead of a shortfall at the top, this rule drops off the bottom. The cousins input as Rule parameters are omitted.
Because if the extra data and a bug in Export filters, it turned out to be necessary to Tag the filtered people in the People View and filter the export on Tags.
I tried using this filtered data for the Relationship Graph. But the output was seriously ugly. (And the lefthand branch of the tree is badly mangled.)
Looks nice! Another interesting display would be side-by-side fan charts, one for you and one for your cousin, with only the relevant people filled in.
Have you tried doing a Filter having a Rule looking for Ancestors of the opposing cousin?
Applying that rule in the Chart view Fan view mode dims the color of the Ancestors NOT in common with the central Person of the chart. (It does NOT hide the other people.
It takes inordinately longer time to run the filters in the the fan chart than anywhere else. [a follow-up: filters applied to the Fan charts resulted in permanently-busy-Gramps. I’ve had to give it the 3-finger salute 4 times now.]
Thanks, that works. I tried it with a cousin for whom we have two different pairs of shared ancestors, and all of them were highlighted in the fan. Then I tried with a filter for the relationship path to the cousin (to highlight all of people in between), but the path leads to only one pair of shared ancestors.
Yes, slow for me too, but less than a minute (my database is probably a lot smaller than yours).
Seems to be proportional to the number of generations in the configuration of the Fan Chart. I let it run and it took over an hour to correlate a simple “Ancestors of <Person ID> (include starting person)” filter before generating a 9 generation Fan.
This obviously is badly in need of some optimization.
I would love to see a very simple tool for that - what I normally do is just create a filter and then draw a relationship graph. My method:
Filter I: People who are my ancestors and people who are descendants of my and my cousin’s most recent common ancestor
Filter II: People who are my cousin’s ancestors and people who are descendants of my and my cousin’s most recent common ancestor
Filter III: People who match filter I and II
(make sure to tick the “include the selected ID” button)
The only downside is that it might draw more than one line if you descend from that ancestor in multiple ways.
For me the ideal tool would have two modes - showing just one closest line or showing all lines. I believe neither is currently possible but my method works in the vast majority of cases if you want just one line. I have actually been working on a few similar graphs today so I know the pain of doing that in so many steps (especially when other softwares can do that in one click).
