My Heritage (for example) will give relationship estimates for a possible match as (for example) ‘child of second cousin’. How can I create a group listing all my second cousins from the RM10 database.
A report and a group are two different things:
- Report: Run the Kinship List report, save it to Excel and, in Excel, filter for “second cousin”.
- Group: I don’t think there is a way within RM short of manually adding each one from the report to a group. It would be a nice enhancement to be able to set up a group for a specific relationship or range of relationships.
Outside of RM, you could use SQLite3 to interrogate the database on the values set by RM’s Set Relationships tool and add those to the designated group. That procedure would take a fraction of a second to execute. There are some examples in blog posts and the forum at sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com
- Make a group of second cousins. It’s actually not too hard to do these days in the latest version of RM.
- Run a report and filter the report by that group. A typical report might be the Individual List. You could also make a Custom Report.
Now for the real fun - how to make a group of your second cousins in the newest version of RM. You can do so by making a Rules based group.I’m going to assume that you want all second cousins and show you how to do that. If you only wanted your second cousins from one family line, I think you will be able see very easily how to adapt the same method to just one family line.
Who are your second cousins? They are the fourth generation descendants of your great grandparents who are not also your first cousins or your siblings or yourself.
How do you get a list of all the fourth generation descendants of your great grandparents? You select all their descendants for four generations generations and then unselect all their descendants for three generations. The people remaining selected at that point are all the fourth generation descendants.
How do remove your first cousins and your siblings and yourself from the list of fourth generation descendants? You unselect all the descendants of your grandparents.
Those are your rules. How do you put them into a group. Here’s the basic overview.
With one exception, all of my great grandparents were married just one time. So the descendants of my great grandfather and of my great grandmother were the same and I only needed to start with one of them. So I chose my great grandfather. The one exception was my great grandmother Mahala Bray who was married twice and who had descendants with both husbands. So I chose to start with her rather than with the husband who was my great grandfather. That way, I included my half second cousins. I could have chosen not to include the half second cousins by choosing Mahala’s husband who was my great grandfather.
Both my grandfathers became widowers as young men with young children and both of them remarried and had additional children. So I started with my grandfathers rather than with my grandmothers when I was unselecting descendants to be sure to unselect everybody that needed to be unselected.
Here are some more specifics. For each great grandparent I used, there is a selection for 4 generations and an unselect for 3 generations. I think that’s about it.
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Great Examples of rules/criteria can be combined!
Although, the Select / Unselect logic can be somewhat confusing at times. (thinking in True/Not True)
Many thanks TomH. The spreadsheet solution is fine for my purpose as I can now quickly find unresolved descendant lines.
Many thanks thejerrybryan for this very thorough methodology. I have just produced the spreadsheets for 2nd and 3rd cousins, and your solution will be worked through as Phase 2 once I have had a first look through the spreadsheet results.
Fantastic explanation @thejerrybryan! Thank you.
While you were studying something useful in college, I was at a music conservatory developing my skills as a trombonist. While I was able to make a living playing and teaching, at 80 and just starting out working with RM, your training would have been more helpful. 
Thanks again for your help in this forum.
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