Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:
It’s Saturday Night again –
Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1) Have you created a Kinship List for any of your ancestors or relatives in your genealogy software program? If so, select an Ancestor – say, one of your great-grandparents, and create a Kinship List of all of their descendants. Or another ancestor further back in time.
2) Show us your work – how you did it, and the Kinship List generated (at least one page of it).
This is the first time I’ve worked with a ‘Kinship’ Report. Thanks to Randy, I had directions to follow!
Randy’s comment at the end of his post caught my attention:
Since Kinship usually includes siblings’ spouses and their siblings, and usually includes spouses with their parents and siblings, this Kinship Report doesn’t really include persons that many researchers would consider Kin. It needs an option to include families of siblings and families of a spouse’s siblings and parents and grandparents within several generations.
Out of curiosity, I tried changing the selection settings to see if I could generate a report showing siblings and their spouses. For this experimentation, I wanted a short list. Thus, I used my grandfather since only one of his children survived to have children.
My first attempt was to select Descendants and spouses.
That list included all of the descendants of my grandfather and all of the spouses.
I then tried a selection based on ‘Descendants and Collateral Lines’.
That report added my grandmother’s siblings.
However, it did not contain my grandfather’s siblings.
Curious as to a definition of collateral lines, I did a google search for “genealogy collateral lines”.
Since I was looking for a more specific answer, I again searched google for the following: “in genealogy, do collateral lines include siblings”. And Google’s AI responded.
I then checked the RootsMagic Users Facebook group for clarification on how RootsMagic defines a collateral line. The first post I found was a direct question with a response similar to the AI definition of collateral lines.
Digging further on Facebook, I found a similar post from 2023. In the comments to that post was a reponse by someone who has helped me a lot with RM issues.
When I searched the RootsMagic Community, I couldn’t find any post that would help clarify this. So, I submitted a question.
(Note: When I tried to create a Kinship report for a different grandfather and selected descendants and collateral lines, it included his great grandmothers back as far as I have data. Changing the generation count did not impact the appearance of these ‘greats’ in the report.)
While I’m now confused about what it means to select ‘Descendants and collateral lines’, I want to thank Randy for making me try a new report!