Did you see the new My Cousins app for finding living relatives?

Question

Hi WikiTreers,

Here is something I'm proud to announce. It's been requested by many of you over the years.

We're calling the app My Cousins. It's a way for you to see your closest living relatives on WikiTree, especially those who are active members like you.

If you're lucky enough to be well-connected on our tree, with lots of ancestors and collateral relatives spidering out in every direction, you might find some surprises here. I did.

As you'll see, you can sort the list by distance (degree), WikiTree contribution count, or common ancestor.

Check it out for yourself: My Cousins.

You can find it on your My WikiTree pull-down menu under Cousins.

Here is more information: Help:MyCousins. If you're wondering why certain people appear and others don't, you might find your answer there.

If you spot problems or have questions or suggestions, post them here. Please post an answer instead of a comment. Comments at the top will be hidden after they are read once. Thanks!

Onward and upward,

Chris and the WikiTree Team

P.S. Thank you to:

1. Ales Trtnik, for his super fast connection finding code. Its speed is making lots of new apps possible.
2. You, for the genealogy you grow here. Its accuracy and degree of interconnectedness is unparalleled anywhere else.

The combination of these two is opening up new possibilities for connecting the human family. I think we're just getting started.

Answer 1

hmm, this is something I have been wanting to have, since I keep running across cousins in WikiTree, but for some reason it's not displaying all my active Wikitree cousins.  

I would suggest that first cousins who are not on WikiTree as members be omitted from the report, I personally have 44 1st cousins on my father's side, not all entered in our tree, but the ones that I have created profiles for (under my management and high privacy) are all showing up in this list.  

Meanwhile, known cousins are not showing, the list stops at 14 but even then doesn't include some WikiTreers I know are within that cousinship distance, no privacy issues to block them from being displayed.  Sniff sniff. 

Comments

Can you give me the profiles, that you think are missing. I will have a look. You can send them privately if privacy is a concern.

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sent you PM with link to one of them.

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I checked with your profile and it isn't displayed due to the 1000 profiles in the result as the limit.

ConnectionFinder searches for closest 1000 profiles. for you that is reached on 14th generation. And only part of the 14th generation is in the results. Then all profiles, that are not visible to you are removed. For you there are 75 profiles left to display and those you can see.

If you want to display more cousins, you can check MyConnections for your father and mother. Each one is limited to 1000 profiles. To go further, use gparents and so on.

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I don't understand, it is only showing 75 profiles or so in the cousins, and 33 in cousins by marriage.

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All living profiles are unlisted unless they are a wikitree member or a notable. And you can't see those unlisted cousins (profiles of living people, that are no WikiTree members) if you are not a manager or on their trusted list.

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I thought this cousins thing was not including non-members, maybe I misunderstood.  But the profiles I speak of are under my management.  Maybe it should be farther than first cousins.  Most of us do know who our first cousins are after all.

Answer 2

Wow! What a fantastic diversion. I may have made a mistake counting manually, but it looks like I have 98 active Wikicousins.

Answer 3

I'm so happy to see this come to fruition! Thank you!!

I'm curious what the limiting factors are. One example, when I look at my list, I see a number of individuals related to me through Rector-188, but not everyone listed as sharing DNA with me on Rector-188 is in my cousin list.

I'd love that we can sort by WikiTree activity, but it's interesting that the sort results in people that have emails associated with their account being below profiles that are managed by others (therefore not "active" WikiTreers). So in my list, when sorted, very active members are at the top, then managed profiles (no email address), then profiles with emails addresses, but no activity.

I know this is for LIVING cousins, but it would be awesome if we had a way to see cousins that have DNA tested, who are now deceased and their profile is managed by someone else who is a WikiTreer.

Thanks again for this great tool!!!

Answer 4

I just love this! It's so much fun to play with. Thanks for all the work!

Answer 5

This is awewome, thank you!

I already knew the two closest cousins by marriage, but other 9 are new to me. Cool!

Answer 6

Thank you, Chris and Team!!!  Love this feature.  Found some new cousins and reminded me of some existing cousins.  So quick and easy to use! Just blew an hour having so much fun.  This is a tool I'll be checking frequently.

Answer 7

Yippee!!  Happy Dance!!  I love this, especially being able to click the Relationship icon right there on the list.  And being able to sort by ancestor?  Brilliant.  Can this be added to the presentation planned for highlighting the features and apps?

Answer 8

Wonderful. Thank you so much!

Answer 9

Sadly so far I've only been able to connect to the global tree through marriages. My only blood relatives on WT as the ones I have added myself. I hoped maybe the app would show me distant relatives through DNA, but that's not the case (yet.)

It does sound like a pretty cool feature though! I'll keep extending my branches and maybe someday I'll finally find unknown cousins here...

Answer 10

I want to see the cousins for the other main family profiles I manage, not just me... Is there a way to do this?

Comments

Edit: Nevermind, only sysops can view other profiles' MyCousins at the moment.

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Using that link, I get "You do not have permission to view MyCousins for (wiki-ID); viewing your own connections instead." where "(wiki-ID)" represents two different profiles I created and manage.

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Ah, maybe it's just a sysop feature then.

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It's still a neat feature, even if my pool of cousins is small. 

Answer 11

I already love it.  And, I found so many more than the three WikiTree member cousins I knew about before.  Since I can sort by number of edits and can see how recently they joined, I'm going to spend some time greeting those who have joined a short time ago and/or have not contributed much.  They probably need a friend (cousin).

One request:  By clicking on the column labels of "Cousins Through Common Ancestors", I can sort by ascending or descending on those columns.  However, the table "Cousins Through Marriage" has no column header labels and is therefore not sortable.  Could you add the sorting feature to that table as well?

Answer 12

Awesome!  Thanks for the dna icons, too!

Answer 13

It's absolutely wonderful.   It's interesting who pops up.

Answer 14

I like the sort by common ancestor function, it's interesting to see the groups, but also very intriguing--the part of the tree I know the best is my grandmother's Massachusetts side, which has like 2 people listed, and instead the biggest groupings of cousins for me are from VA.  

And I have only 4 cousins by marriage!  

Which leads to my feature request--would it be possible to get the number of cousins listed on the chart?  "X cousins through common ancestors" "Y cousins by marriage" for example?  Obviously in my case the later is easy enough to count, but the former was more trouble and a tally would also give those of us who obsess over things like this an easy way to see if a new cousin/branch of the tree shows up.

Answer 15

How does the Common Ancestor get picked?  I guess more specifically:  why is it picking the male common ancestor over the female common ancestor?  Especially given that when I then do 'find my relationship' with the cousins list, it seems to default to displaying our relation based on the female common ancestor.  So the list says Drake-4316 but the relationship finder displays Cole-9764

Comments

Hi Celia. It's just an accident of the coding. In one case, it checks fathers before mothers. In the other, it checks mothers before fathers. None of it was done intentionally. We could be consistent and intentional, but then we'd have a hard choice to make. :-)

Answer 16

Nice tool. I would love if we could eliminate the cousins that we are profile managers for to help locate new pathways

Answer 17

Thank you to everyone who worked on this app. It is so much fun. I am always impressed by the creativity and amazing work of WikiTree volunteers. Anne

Answer 18

Extremely well done. Thank you so much for getting that together. It will be great being able to catch up with cousins that I hadn't noticed before!!!

Comments

Displaying 69 cousins, to a distance of 22. 48 Active, or at one stage active cousins, 11 with over 1000 contributions. 12 through marriage, with 11 of those active.

It was well worth the wait for this new feature. Surely this puts Wikitree far and above any other family tree site!!

Answer 19

Thanks for the Cousins app. I've been through my cousins down to 6th generation. For me that's not too hard to do.

I just wish I had a lot more cousins on WT.

Answer 20

Chris and Ales, thank you so much! That was loads of fun...I wish I had more time but I really need to head off to bed and I've been utterly absorbed in the app since reading this post...way 'o' why do I have to have work in the morning - I know what I'd rather be doing LOL. I had 57 cousins and more through marriage