The relationship between the person you have selected on your screen, will show the relationship between that person and the "Home" person. But, sometimes you may want to look at other relationships.
Family Tree Maker has a Relationship Calculator feature.
In my research, I found that my parents were related to each other before they were married. Here is how you can determine these relationships.
Go to the People Workspace, Person View, and click on the Tools menu. Select the Relationship Calculator.
This will bring up a screen, that will allow you to select the two people that you want to see how they are related.
In this case my father and mother. The First ICON to the Right if the Name, will bring up the Index, where you can select the names.. At first glance, is shows Husband and Wife. BUT, on the Relationship line, there is a Number 2. This indicates that there is another Relationship between these two people.
The pull down menu indicates that they are 5th cousins 2 times removed. By selecting that 2nd relationship the Right Hand Panel will show the relationships.
That's difficult to see the relationship, so click on the View Relationship Chart.
This is only a part of the full chat, but this view will show back to the Common Ancestor.
One other thing to do, is to Switch these two people in that earlier screen. There may be other, more distant relationships.
In this view, my parents are related 5 times.
Lesson Learned: I am asked many times, should I split may file, based on mother and father, or grandparents, etc. This is an example of the benefit of maintaining one file. You may miss this fun information.
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Copyright © 2012 by H R Worthington
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Great post and a perfect reason for not splitting your files. I was on the fence about that and will now add my dad's side with my mother's side. I have no doubt I'll probably find some relationship since they both were born and raised in the same town.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the informative blog. I subscribed here after I got FTM2012 and I can see your blog will be most helpful!
Tanya,
ReplyDeleteI am glad it was helpful.
Good luck,
Russ
Russ, I had always known about the Relationship Calculator, but I thought it only showed the closest relationship, in the case of my parents, husband and wife. Is the ability to view other relationships new to the newest FTM releases? I just tried this for my parents with my Family Tree Maker for Mac 2, and (after "thinking" for a couple of minutes), it comes up with 5,130 relationships, most of which indicate: "No common ancestor" when I click on them because it's outrageous relationships like "grandson of brother-in-law of great grand nephew of wife of 2nd cousin 4x removed of step grandmother."
ReplyDeleteI do find the relationships I knew about (and one I didn't), but it seems a little silly to have all these other relationships if there is no common relative. I wonder if there is a way to make the program list these relationships only if there is a common ancestor.
Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteI don't think that FTMM-2 has this features ts it was just introduced to FTM2012. Sorry.
If the People Workspace, Family View, with some one selected, that will list the "nearest" relationship to the "home person. That doesn't mean that there aren't other relationships. The Kinship Report doesn't show all of the relationships either.
I was just demonstrating how to show the relationship between two people. I have used it in a couple of books, to show the relationship between the focus person of the book, and some figure / person of interest in the back are related.
I just did a research project for a Civil War Character and wanted to show our common ancestor and the chart that is on this blog was like the one I used.
AND, I did this blog to answer a User's question about Splitting a file.
Thank you for your comment.
Russ