Very interesting.
I am limiting my research to direct ancestors, their spouses (including the ones who are not a direct ancestor), and their children.
As the work progresses in time, it frequently occurs that among those children there is more than one who is a direct ancestor.
From what you say, I gather that those would continue receiving the main color code (in my case Maroon), thus the parents and one or more children would be marooned.
There are occasions that husband and both wives are direct ancestors, or, one wife, and several of her husbands (and some of their children).
From what you describe, I assume your script first “maroons”, those ancestors, and then color codes the remaining siblings accordingly.
In all this, I feel the “spouse of” issue makes understanding the relationships exceedingly complex, and the information given unhelpful (as I tried to show in the image in my initial request, where my 30th GGfather appears as the Spouse of a second cousin 29 times removed).
Actually, Version 2 of my script “reds” the direct ancestors and in effect also “reds” the siblings. So everybody I’m related to is presently the same color. The siblings are various degrees of aunts and uncles and their children are various degrees of cousins. It would be a trivial change to use a different color for the aunts and uncles and cousins in a Version 3 of my script. It would require changing only one line of the script.
I have been thinking about doing so. But my script already uses lots of different colors. For example, I have people in my database that I’m not related to at all and yet I don’t want to remove them from my database. So they have a color. And the spouses have parents and siblings who are color coded in their own unique way, one color for the parents and a different color for the siblings. So I’m sort of running out of good colors to use. Starting with RM8, there are lots of colors to use. But many of the colors look too much alike for my tired old eyes to tell them apart. For example, I’m thinking about leaving my direct ancestors as red, and then making the aunts and uncles and cousins as maroon. But I’m not sure if I can tell red and maroon apart.
Yes, that is an additional problem. I prefer to use just a color for my direct ancestors. The rest comes off clearly when you are looking at the main ancestor in the family view.
In the database of my wife, I put her father’s ancestors in red, and her mother’s in blue. The problem came with her 4th great grandmother who was so for both her father and her mother after she remarried.
I made a poster with all those generations, and it required some switching around to be able to show that. Lots of fun, though!
Agreed…
that would go a long way – I think uses should also be able to access the text of relationship Text within RM as well some of the other Relate /Flags (in user friendly form)
Kevin
Some monitors (older especially) – the difference is often very subtle – even when printed.
I use different coloring that you and my script currently does things different but similar in principal
I recently developed a SQlite script that sets relationships in RM without any spouse-of flags being set. It also filters according to the child-parent type of lineage (Birth, Adoptive, Step, Foster, …) which I think RM ignores while following whatever line was last selected in the Pedigree View (at least that’s the way it used to work). My script can follow only the Birth lineage or any combination, setting the relationship to the nearest common ancestor. Of course, that really only makes sense for the Birth or blood line and, even then, social nearness can be ‘closer’ than blood.
Comparing two couples, all of whom are related to the reference person:
| Name | RM10 Set Relationships | My Set Relationships |
|---|---|---|
| Couple 1 | ||
| Isaac | Nephew | Nephew |
| Lillie | Spouse of nephew | Grand-niece |
| Couple 2 | ||
| John | Spouse of niece | 1st cousin once removed |
| Elizabeth | Niece | Niece |
Looks like “spouse of” is applied to the more distant member of the couple but that is a small sample. At the database level, RM does not actually store the “spouse of” person’s actual relationship to the reference; rather, it stores for that person the other-half’s relationship along with a flag signifying “spouse of”. That must be a shortcut for rapid display. Unfortunately, one cannot simply strip the Flags using sqlite to recover the relationship.
I’ve yet to post my script to sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com because there’s still some testing and tidying to do but early results were looking good before I had to break off for other things.
What I found with RM is that the relationship such as g-aunt/ g- uncle when you are related to both the blood relationship is applied to the PATERNAL side of the line and the spouse of is applied to the maternal side of the line and that changes from generation to generation.
For example my nieces and nephews-- my Mom’s sister always show up as spouse of the g-uncle instead of g-aunt.
And I’ve seen it numerous times in many lines
If RM does apply “spouse of” to the more distant member of a couple as I suspect, what it chooses for equidistant members may be determined by rule, e.g., deliberately apply it to the MotherID member, or it is simply a byproduct of the order of processing.
What RM’s Set Relationships does is arguably unnecessary given the power of contemporary processors. It’s purpose is to expedite the display of the relationship between the reference person and the focus person by batch calculating it and placing results into 3 fields for each person that are then used by the current window to look up and display a string of text. Three fields are insufficient to handle both the lineage relationship and the “spouse of”. I think other software calculates that 2-person relationship on the fly so there is no need to rerun Set Relationships when a new relative is added or there has been a change in lineage.