Kinship Report - Collateral Lines

I tried creating a Kinship report using

  • Select from List
  • Mark an individual (Leon Crawford)
  • Mark Descendants of highlighted person
  • Select Descendants and collateral lines

Based on the results, I’m not sure I understand what a ‘collateral line’ includes.

My report included the siblings of the spouse of the Leon Crawford (original person) but did NOT contain the siblings of Leon Crawford.

When I switched to a different person in my tree, the report did include the siblings of both the original person and his spouse. However, it also included great grandmothers of the orignal person even though I selected descendants for ONE generation.

Thus, I’m confused about the definition of collateral lines.

1 Like

I believe the collateral lines refer to ancestors, descendants, other relatives, etc. of the spouses of one of your direct lines.

giggle came up with this -

kin, or lines of kin, that are not in a direct line of descent from an individual

From what I have seen, collateral lines would be all the ancestors and descendants of the SPOUSES that you have in your database–for example, my sis and cousin married siblings–so I have all my brother-in-laws siblings, parent and ancestors ( for a few generations) plus their descendants–all of which are considered collateral lines…
So if you were going to do a drop n drag, all these people would be included in the new database BUT a KINSHIP REPORT only pertains to those who are RELATED to the person by blood or marriage–so a kinship report for me would only show my brother-in-law and his sister (wife of the cousin)…

I am totally baffled on this one–and can’t duplicate it–depending on what you selected to mark, the spouse’s sibling should show up as in-laws…

also confused abt this as descendant 1 generation/ desc and spouse 1 generation --only gives me the person or person and spouse…

Basically on a Kinship Report, it does NOT matter if you pick
Everyone in database
Everyone in person’s highlighted tree
Ancestors and Collateral lines-- even when restricted to so many generations
or Descendants and Collateral lines - even when restricted to so many generations,
YOU WILL GET EVERYBODY YOU ARE RELATED TO!!!–not sure if that is how it is suppose to work BUT that is what happens…
note-- this is NOT the case on a drop n drag-- there are some differences in who is included in the new database…

On Kinship Report, you can use ancestors or descendants to reduce the amount of people included…
Direct Ancestors and Direct descendants are self- explanatory BUT here is what you MIGHT
get on some of the others:

descendants and spouses 1 generation–should give you only the person and his wife

descendants and spouses 2 generations–
gives you only the person , his wife, his kids and their spouses…

note-- the more generations, the more descendants and spouses…

ancestors 2 generations and descendants for 1 generation will give you the person, his wife, his kids and their spouses, his parents, his siblings and their spouses …

ancestors 3 generations and descendants for 2 generations–gives all the above plus grandkids / their spouses and nieces and nephews and their spouses–it also gives you the person’s grandparents BUT none of their kids
–noting again, the more generations, the more you will include in the list…

The really BIG thing to REMEMBER is that every time you go into MARK the people you want, you MUST CHANGE the number of generations to include on ANCESTORS/ DESCENDANTS—otherwise you think you are getting 3 generations of ancestors and 2 generations of descendants when both actually had 10 generations marked…

I wish the term “collateral lines” would be documented in the help so we knew exactly how it is implemented in RM.

Why does it need to be documented in RM Help? It is not a RM specific term. Collateral lines was one of the first things I learned in my genealogy wandering. RM seems to hold true to the accepted definition as far as I can tell. An easy way to look at it is a collateral line is the descendants of the siblings of your direct ancestor (eg the descendants of your great-grandfather’s brother and sisters).

2 Likes