Saturday, May 29, 2010

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun- your Relationship Calculator

Hey genealogy buffs - it's Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (come on, don't be a party pooper...) is:

1) Open up the genealogy software program of your choice.

2) Think about two special people in your family tree (your parents? your spouse? a famous person? a distant cousin? yourself?).

3) Use the Relationship Calculator in the software to determine the relationship between the two special people. If you don't know where to find the Relationship Calculator, go to the Help button and find out. Follow the directions!

4) Tell us about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a comment to this post on my blog, or in a Note or comment on Facebook.

Have fun!!

Here's mine:

I used RootsMagic 4 for this exercise. The Relationship Calculator is in the Tools menu.

1) I have a whole lot of Seaver persons in my database, so I chose myself and Tom Seaver, the Hall of Fame pitcher. "Cousin Tom" and I are tenth cousins - our most recent common ancestors are Robert Seaver (1608-1683) and Elizabeth Ballard (????-1657).

2) My parents, Frederick W. Seaver (1911-1983) and Betty Virginia Carringer (1919-2002): There are 11 matches listed. They include:

* 7th cousins, most recent common ancestors (MRCA) are Timothy Hamant and Melatish Clark
* 8th cousins once removed, MRCA are Joseph Clarke and Alice Fenn
* 9th cousins, MRCA are Joseph Holloway and Rose Allen
* 10th cousin once removed, MRCA are Rev. Stephen Bachiler and Anne

I knew about the Hamant/Clark and Holloway/Allen cousinships, but I'm wondering about the others, especially the Bachiler/Anne match. I need to check that out.

Is there another tool hiding in the software that permits me to print out the descent from the common ancestors to the two persons? In RootsMagic, there is the Relationship Chart where you can input two persons and see the line of descent from the Common Ancestor. That worked fine for my parents - but it only gave me the Timothy Hamant/Melatiah Clark line. I had to input my parents, and Stephen Bachiler to see the two descents - I couldn't get a relationship report for my parents and Bachiler/Anne as the MRCA.

2 comments:

Midge Frazel said...

Midge Frazel and President John Adams 3rd cousins 7 times removed. (I added this in when I was watching the HBO special on John Adams)

Jo said...

Thought this was a fun challenge. Check out my connection to Bill Gates of Microsoft fame. http://arnspiger.blogspot.com/2010/05/sngf-challenge-using-relationship.html