Relative Finder is a site created by the Computer Science department of BYU. It is used to find any connection now matter how distant to famous or historical people. In the beginning it used information from AFN (ancenstral file Number). They have since update the site to work more closely with the information now available at Familysearch.org The AFNs are now very out of date and were never very accurate anyways so the familysearch.org information is much better. (though at times I'm not sure if it is wholly information out of familysearch.org or including some of the older less accurate information from AFNs)
The site has also become intigrated with facebook so the site location, style and way of doing things has changed a bit.
The new site is located at http://roots-fb.cs.byu.edu/
You'll need to have an account created at familysearch.org to use this site.
Keep in mind that the more you can connect to in familysearch.org the better.
I believe they recommend at least 6 generations, though the more the better.
Since I have generations upon generations of information available I'm able to see a ton.
Get someone that has only 4 generations and you likely will not have much come up.
though as you will see later it might not matter so much.
Relative finder will have to import your tree from family search so they can compare and make connections. Relative finder now has two major methods for making connections
1) using a predefined group of people off of their list (ie. European Royalty, Famous Americans, Signers of Declaration of Independence, etc.)
2) joining/creating a group and comparing with people in that group.
I've been having trouble lately to define, manage and edit my groups so keep that in mind.
Joining a custom group has several advantages. You can find connections through common ancestors to others in the group. This can be great for an extended family group or a bunch of people that have an activity or organization in common. Again the more information available from Family Search the better. You will also want update regularly as new information and updated information is constantly showing up in Family Search.
You can use your created groups to find out if anyone in the group is related. So if you have a friend from college, local church group, or other association you can use relative finder to help with finding connections. In the past you could add people to your group via their AFN number. This was helpful if you wanted to track down a historical figure. I have not figured out how to do that in the new facebook friendly version.
One of the problems with including historical figures in your custom group is tracking down their PID (the 8 digit number from the Pedigree Resource File). Many are still being listed or providing the old AFN.
Upon pulling up the relative finder website you will be asked to log in or create your account.
If you are logging in and will not be using facebook, I found you have to click the text at the top.
The picture below shows this. It was confusing at first since I felt I'd already logged in an must be doing something wrong as the screen looked the same.
One of the first things you need to do after logging in especially if you have not been on for a while is update your tree information. This allow for them to get the most accurate connections.
The relatives section is where all the predefined groups are housed. You just check off the ones you want to search on and click the show relatives button.
Some of the most interesting are European Royalty, and famous Americans.
After running the report you will get a chart like form that shows the person, your relationship, a lineage view (ie. MMMFMFFFFM ....), and the ability to view the chart for this person showing your relationship.
Below is a view of part of the page showing how you are to the person in question.
You'll see that the go from generation to generation via the male or female. In theory you should be able to track this backwards in your familysearch.org tree. However, due to the origins with AFNs I have not been able to in all cases. It is a good exercise to actually track backwards the information provided and see if you can make the links. I've had problems with this in the past, though it seems to be getting better (this may be due to usage of the older AFN information). With constant updates things have been improving each time I visit the site. So come back frequently.
In cases were you are a 10th cousin twice removed type you'll find two parallel sections. The common ancestor is on the bottom and you in theory should be able to make all the connections in familysearch.org.
Hopefully this has been somewhat helpful. As things have changed with relative finder the old documentation has not been usable anymore.
Please post some of your interesting finds. I love when I can claim I'm 8th cousins 5 times removed to Walt Disney. Basically, I'm as related to him as I am to you (well maybe not that bad but, you get the point). To bad that does not get me in to Disneyland for free due to the recent price increases.
Buaidh - NO - Bas
No comments:
Post a Comment