I have some names in my RM11 database (db) that have no relationship to me (after setting relationships). I cannot find what family line they link back to me. When I run the Association List, the result is a blank page. I ran the Kinship List and the collateral person I’m looking for does not show up on the report. And I get a blank Relationship chart. This collateral person is in my tree.
Does anyone have any suggestions to find out how a person with no assigned relation and is in your tree links to you. I want to track the family line they link to from me to them.
BTW I have over 480k names in my db. Would like to remove some collateral names possibly.
I have several, most of which happened when I removed, renamed or changed someone at the top of that tree who is/was linked to me (maybe a wrong spouse or a renamed spouse) leaving isolated descendants. I tend to keep those in the event that a link to me later emerges.
If your non-relatives are in an additional tree they would not show a relationship to you (yet!!).
Count Trees is also on the People page under Tools.
If you have gone up a relatives spouse’s line you will have a bunch of unrelated people in the database. I have done this when the surname is familiar in the area and I believe they connect into other family lines.
It doesn’t really improve a thing to say it again but I’ll say it again anyway - Count Trees.
The only reason I’m posting is to alert you that even though Count Trees is a wonderful tool, it can be a little confusing. For each disconnected tree, the report lists one person to represent that tree. The one person it chooses to represent that tree may or may not make obvious sense as to who all might be in that disconnected tree. So for each disconnected tree, you have to do a little digging. You can’t just look at the one name that’s listed to see who is really in the tree.
My RM database probably has more disconnected trees than most. It’s presently at about 40,000 people, down from a maximum of 60,000 from before I began a major cleanup project a few years ago to get rid of people I didn’t really want to research in any depth because I’m really not connected to them. Even so, I still have quite a few unconnected trees when I run Count Trees.
One cause is that I will go into something like a cemetery or a marriage book are a death certificate database and chase down everybody with my surname of Bryan (or other surnames of great interest to me). My theory is that it is likely that I will be related to them and that I just haven’t found the relationship yet. And I do eventually find a lot of new relatives that way, but they are in disconnected trees until I find that relationship.
The other is that I do have people in my database with surnames of interest that I’m not related to and I need to research them anyway to be sure whether they are related to me or not. For another Bryan example, my Bryan family moved from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia to the Dumplin Valley area of Sevier County, Tennessee in 1790. But there is another Bryan family in the Wears Valley area of Sevier County that is not related to us at all. But they show up in marriage books and death certificates and census records and the like for Sevier County. So I have to keep track of them in my database in order to keep the families apart.
Similarly, the famous American frontiersman Daniel Boone married Rebecca Bryan, and there is a strong oral family tradition in my family that we are related to Daniel Boone via marriage. But modern genealogical research and especially modern Y-DNA tests suggest that we are not related to Daniel Boone’s wife Rebecca Bryan at all. So I keep a lot of Rebecca’s relatives in my database in a disconnected tree to protect myself from confusing my Bryan family with hers.
I have a simple python script that will find the connection between any 2 people, if it exists, whether through parent-child, spouse, association or shared fact. It will need a bit of explanation, but it works well.
Understanding relationships between collateral relatives can be one of the more challenging aspects of genealogy research, especially in larger family trees. Tools that visualize family connections and relationship paths can make it easier to identify how individuals are connected. Resources such as the FamilySearch Wiki and the National Genealogical Society provide useful guidance on kinship terminology, family tree analysis, and genealogical research methods. Learning how collateral relatives connect within a family structure can help improve research accuracy and uncover previously overlooked relationships.
