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Part three of our cycle relationship tutorial deals with another possibility to cope with “pedigree collapses”.

Today: Mark two profiles as partners

The most frequent reason for a cycle relationship is a partnership or marriage within the family tree. This would be the case when two cousins marry.

In our example, Patricia and Jim Jameson are to be marked as partners.

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To add a cycle, click on the icon in the lower right hand corner of your family tree:

 Then you choose the two profiles by clicking on them. The popup window suggests the possible cycles and you choose “Person 1 is the Husband of Person 2“. When you click on “Save” the two persons will be marked as married. In the profile, you can change the status to “Partner, Ex-Husband…“, of course.

After saving, the tree looks as follows from “Jim Jameson’s” point of view:

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 Both persons are displayed as partners and the profile that appears twice from this point of view, “Patricia Jameson“, has a grey node to indicate the cycle.

Yesterday, we’ve introduced you to the new cycle relationship feature. Today, we’ll be getting further into the details of this new feature and present you the three possible cases of cycles.

Today: Mark double profiles as identical

A person appears twice in the tree (so there is a cycle relationship) and the profile has already been added twice to the tree. With the new feature, the two profiles can be marked as identical. This should only be the necessary if you already added the double relationship by means of two profiles before we introduced the cycle relationship feature. In the following example, “Jim Jones” appears twice.

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To add a cycle, click on the icon in the lower right hand corner of your family tree:

Then you pick the two profiles with a click in the tree. From the options of possible cycle relationships suggested in the popup window, you choose “Person 1 and Person 2 are the same person“. A click on “Save” marks the two profiles as identical and the profile you clicked on first (i.e. Person 1) inherits all information stored in Person 2’s profile. Person 2 will be deleted.

Tip: It is always better to click on the profile with more information first so that less information will be lost with the deletion of Person 2.

After saving, the tree looks as follows:

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Let’s have a look at the tree from “Hillary Joyce’s” persepective. In this view, the cycle relationship nodes change, too. Now, it’s “Jim Jones” who appears with a coloured and a grey node.

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As the two connected profiles can be quite far away from each other in large trees, you can jump to the other by clicking on the little “+” in the upper left hand corner in the two profiles.

 There are three important rules for “marking persons as identical“:

• To mark two persons as identical means that Person 1 inherits all information from Person 2 and Person 2 will be deleted in the process. That means that Person 2’s profile cannot be a claimed one, i.e. it cannot be a profile of an active relative in your tree.
• No person can have more than 2 parents. Explanation: When you mark two persons as identical, Person 1 gets Person 2’s parents. When the persons are “marked as siblings“, Person 1 and 2 get each others’ parents (and siblings). This, of course, cannot mean that they have 4 parents. That is why the options “mark as identical” and “mark as siblings” are not always available.
• If you delete a person you added, the action cannot be reversed. Explanation: Person 2 is deleted when you mark two persons as identical. Even if you delete the cycle relationship later, Person 2 will be deleted for ever.

Cycle relationships are also known as „pedigree collapse“ and occur when a person appears more than once in a family tree. For example, when a man marries his cousin, they have a pair of grandparents in common. As a result, their children will have only 3 pairs of great-grandparents instead of 4. Another frequent case is two brothers marrying two sisters from another part of the family tree.

With a new feature, you can now mark these profiles as appearing twice. On itsourtree.com, these double profiles appear as grey nodes. By clicking on the “+” in the upper right hand corner of the profile node, you can switch between the profiles.

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To add a cycle, click on the icon in the lower right hand corner of your family tree:

Then you select the two profiles. To do so, just click on the node you’d like to select. If you can’t see the profile in the section of the tree that you’re looking at, simply navigate to the spot you’re looking for. When both profiles have been selected, the system will suggest possible cases of a cycle.

There are three possible cases:
1.    The persons are identical (because two profiles had been added for one person)
2.    Siblings
3.    Partner
You just pick the correct option and click “Save” (Please note: the three options will not be available in any case. Exceptions result from the rules at the end of this text.)

(Click image to enlarge)

To delete/undo a cycle, click on the “x” in the upper right hand corner of the grey (!!!) profile (just as if you wanted to delete the profile). A window appears to ask you if you really want to delete the cycle. If you confirm, the cycle will be deleted.

Some basic rules about cycle relationships

1. To mark a person as identical means that person 1 inherits all connections of person 2. Person 2 will be deleted.
2. The amount of parents can never be more than 2. Explanation: When “marked as identical”, person 1 gets all parents of person 2. When “marked as siblings”, person 1 (and all his/her siblings) gets all parents from person 2 and vice versa person 2 (and all his/her siblings) gets all parents from person 1. Here, of course, a person cannot have more than 2 parents. That is why the options “mark as identical” and “mark as siblings” are not always available.
3. The deletion of a person I added cannot be reversed. Explanation: When you mark two persons as “identical”, one person will be deleted. Even if the cycle is deleted later on, person 2 will always be deleted.
4. Persons cannot be ancestors or siblings of their own ancestors.
5. Persons cannot be descendants or siblings of their own siblings.
6. A person can theoretically be anyone’s partner if he/she isn’t already the partner.
7. A person cannot be child AND sibling of a person of a parent (or any following generation). For further information see 4. and 5.

Today, we’ve added a couple of new features that we’re going to present and explain in the next days. The first to be mentioned: New privacy options!

Assuming that there are photos of you in your relatives’ or friends’ photo albums that you don’t want to be marked in, let’s say that you look… a little… stupid in a picture and you don’t want others to see you like this.

That’s why we added new privacy settings for your photos and, also important, photos that you have been marked in by other users and relatives. From now on, you can determine whether others’ tags of you are visible or not. You can set the visibility for either people in your tree, your friends, everyone (public) or all of these.

To access the new features, click on “Privacy” in your “Settings“. There’s a new link that says “expand“. A click on it will show the new options.

We’ve added some first-aid tooltips to the login page to help new users with the login. To see the short help texts, simply point on the little question mark: . We will add more of these handy little helpers to make the use of the site even easier. The next tooltips for example will help you change a person’s parents.

From now on, searching for your ancestors is even easier: We’ve added a sort feature to your list of family members that helps you keep your head above water. Now, you can sort your list alphabetically or by degree of relationship.

If you want to know how many profiles you added, click on the little arrow next to “Added by“.

This powerful sorting feature is a third opportunity to organize your relatives, apart from the “Navigator” and the search function.

RSS feeds help you to keep up to date with your tree and our blog. An RSS feed shows you the headline of the latest news and a teaser of the text. To follow an RSS feed, you need an RSS reader. Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Thunderbird already have an RSS reader as part of the application. However, there are others like the Google Reader, Bloglines or My Yahoo.

To know if a website offers the RSS feed feature or not, you have to look for the tiny RSS logo in your browser’s address bar.

We offer RSS feeds for the family tree and the blog. To subscribe to the feed, click on the icon in your address bar and pick the RSS reader of your choice. The family tree RSS feed will show you the newest profiles in your tree and the blog RSS feed tells you about the newest blog posts.

Grandpa doesn’t even know a thing about the internet and Uncle Alfred is afraid of being physically infected by online viruses. That’s okay. Instead of trying to change your relatives, simply print a few copies of our brand new family questionnaire and take them to the next family fiesta.

You will always find it on our press page. With this questionnaire, you can let your (”offline”) relatives share their information and their knowledge with you and you can complete your family tree yourself.

As you probably know, you can use our comic avatars for your relatives’ profile image if you don’t have a picture (or if you don’t have a picture you like ). To be as appropriate as possible, we will add some new avatar pictures during the next few weeks, such as the nurse, the jogger and the surfer-dude.

Just as all other avatars, you can choose your favourite in the profile by clicking on “Edit portrait“.
So wait and see, there’s more to come…

Many users have already encountered the following situation: You’re entering your relatives’ data and, in the heat of the moment, you add children and parents and later on you notice that the child is an offspring of the father’s first marriage or the second wife you entered is the biological mother. Until today you had to delete the child completely and add it again with the right parents. So much the worse when you’ve already added the child’s own offsprings.

But these worries are gone now! In our example, Father and Partner 1 are the parents added for the child. Then you notice that Son’s mother is not Partner 1 but Partner 2.

In the child’s profile you will now find the new tab “Parents”. In the dropdown menu the current parents and all partners of the parents are displayed. Now, you just have to pick the correct combination, in this case Father and Partner 2. Then click “Save”.

The changes will directly be visible in the tree. If there are any descendants or partners attached to the child, they will be moved, too.

We’ve got a new feature for you as a late Christmas present: loads of new options for your tree.

From now on, you’ll find the “Settings”-icon next to the other icons in the lower right corner of your tree. A click on it offers lots of changes to your tree which we are going to explain to you in the next days (e.g. ***-kicking rotating nodes! )

But now to the first part of the settings: the “Tree style”. Until now, it has only been possible to show the tree in a standard view. The new feature offers three new styles. Here, they are presented briefly:

The first option is the “Vertical style”. Here, you see all profiles in a vertical format. In this view, the tree doesn’t go from left to right but from up to down. In the other two variants, you can choose whether you would like to display your relative’s “names only” or “photos only”. All other information (like the birthday) remains hidden. Of course, this setting effects the printing layout, too.

You’ve got mail!

Just in time for Christmas, we’ve got a new feature for you: the message system.

To open your mailbox, just click the tab “Messages”. Here you can send messages to the relatives in your tree. Just like in most other mail clients you can organize your mails in various folders (Inbox, Drafts, Archive… etc.).

To send a message just click “Write new message” on the left side and choose one or more recipients from your family tree. Then type in your message text and click “send”.

If there is no email address for the recipient of your choice, you can add it in the next step. The person will be invited to your tree automatically and can read your message after registering.

Soon, you will be able to write messages to persons in other trees and add them to your tree as “Family friends”. Stay tuned!

By the way: We will send you a notification when you get a new message. In case that you don’t want to get these notifications you can switch them off in your “Settings”.