Filter for male-line descendants

Is there currently a way to filter male-line descendants only? I know you can somewhat achieve it by combining descendant filter with the name matching filter but that workaround doesn’t always work (identical names, surnames not inherited in the male line, surnames used as first names etc.). Any ideas?

Today I noticed, for the first time, the “Father lineage” and “Mother lineage” person quick views. These show male-only or female-only ancestors and descendants of the selected person. (The descendants in the “Mother lineage” are not a complete set of mt-DNA descendants; the sons of those females also share their mother’s mt-DNA.)

Thanks! That’s a great tool, but it still doesn’t allow me to filter these people to then create a relationship graph. Do you know if there’s a way to plot the “Father lineage” view?

It sounds like you need one of these filters that @Mattkmmr is developing.

How were you filtering by multiple names? Or maybe you were using surname filters rather than given name.

There is a ‘Males’ rule in ‘General filters’ that you can stack with any existing ‘Descendant filter’ rule.

Then make certain that the ‘All rules must apply’ is selected from the Options pop-up menu.

The Example 3 of 1-stage filters does a female descendants variation of your question.

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@GeorgeWilmes I don’t think these filters would work because Y-DNA would include only male male-line descendants (without female descendants in the male line because they do not have a Y chromosome).

@emyoulation What I did was:

  1. People with a name matching in which I put the surname
  2. Descendants of , inclusive

The Example 3 doesn’t work unfortunately - it includes all male (or all female) descendants - but what I want to do is to select descendants in male line (for whom all ancestors leading to the root person are male).

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Hmm. Maybe you’re not actually asking about males descendants but are looking for genetic Descendants… the Y chromosome inheritors?

[Oops… Wrote this while you were writing your reply above]

Not quite! Y chromosome inheritors wouldn’t include females in the male line.

So a 2 stage… First, finding the Y-chromosome descendants, then expanding to their immediate offspring. (Can’t use a siblings filter because of those who had children but no sons.)

That’s a conundrum. Looking…

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Yes, that would be a perfect solution if only the Y-chromosome filter were available. So the search for a workaround continues?

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So you want males and females in the lowest (most recent) generation of the tree (going downward from the ancestor), but only males in all of the higher levels?

Yes, that’s right - for simplicity’s sake, that would be a “surname family tree”.

But unmarried females in the earlier generations would also share the same surname?

Ah, yes - I thought you meant the lowest level for each branch. I want to include all descendants in the male line, i.e. descendants for whom there is a chain of ancestors that links them to the progenitor and consists of men only (which is the same as Y chromosome descendants + their daughters and sisters).

You want all the descendants of a person, male and female, but not the branches of the females.

Your filter should give you what you want.

  • Descendants of , inclusive.
  • People with a name matching surname
    All rules must apply

When setting the Surname, there are two fields to enter the Surname

People with the <name>, Full Family Name =
OR Single Surname =

Not sure of how you have set your database, but this may be an issue depending on the name. The other issue would be how do you configure the females. Do you put them in as only Birth Name or Married Names? and if Married names, which is used as the Preferred Name.

Ok. Bit of work but…

@Mattkmmr just posted a Shared Y-DNA that would do the 1st stage. It is so new that you’d have to add it manually. It hasn’t been pushed into the Plugin Manager system yet. It still needs some tweaks. It should be moved from General filters to Descendant filters. And it could use an Inclusive: Include selected Gramps ID checkbox like the “Descendants of <person>” from Descendant filters. )

Copy the ID of the Ancestor (to save a few steps)
Start by creating a Person custom filter called SharedYdnaLine

Add the following rules:
General filters: Descendants of <person> sharing yDNA
paste the clipboarded ID for the value

General filters: Person with <Id>
paste the clipboarded ID for the value

Set Options to
At least one rule must apply

Use that filter’s output to feed a second stage filter:

Ancestral filters: Children of <filter> match
set the Filter name value to SharedYdnaLine

General filters: Person with <Id>
paste the clipboarded ID for the value

Set Options to
At least one rule must apply

If you don’t include the Person with <Id> rule in both filters, you’ll miss people in the top generations.

If you need the mothers, swap the Person rule in the 2nd-stage filter with:
Family filters: Parents of <filter> match
set the Filter name value to SharedYdnaLine

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@DaveSch Yes, that’s pretty much the same workaround that I used but it’s not perfect because with larger trees there’s a decent chance someone with the same surname will eventually marry into the family somewhere down the line. Also it doesn’t work when a son and his father have different surnames.

@emyoulation Yes, that should work - thank you! Never added a filter manually so will learn something new along the way.

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There is a problem.

The DNA filters are only valid for “Birth” children. Any “Adopted” child is excluded. This is valid for a DNA filter but may not hold true doing a “Family” filter

I suspect that this filter is insensitive to the birth/foster/step/adopted relationship status. [Dave’s tests show this was an incorrect assumption. The filter only recognizes Birth type relationships. Although the children rule in the 2nd stage probably isn’t that stringent.]

So long as the boy is a child under a relationship where the man is designated as a father, the boy will probably match the filter. I’m guessing that Gramps isn’t actually testing DNA data for this filter.

So this means that if you haven’t cross-polinated families, the step-children probably won’t show but the adopted will.

I typically add step-children from a previous marriage into the new marriage ONLY when they appear as a member of the blended household in some source file. Like… when a Census lists a step-child under the Head. (When I don’t use the step relationship feature in those instances, I tend to add too many duplicates that have to be merged.) With adult step-children, I tend to leave them out of the blended household.