colored lines

Patrick,

Basically if you've got the solid blue line - then its a direct "bloodline"...

Each time a marriage occurs and a "new" bloodline occurs - then the color changes... Once the palette runs out - it will repeat colors over again but there isn't really any significance to the colors per se.

The colors aren't really significant after the first change - they are just indicating "in-law" connections - and then "in-law" to "in-law" and so forth...

For instance, I have two sisters... Each of the men that they married are my brother-in-law, but my two brother-in-laws aren't related to each other except through marriage... So - the links change colors three times if you compared my brother-in-laws relationship. If you look at one of my brother-in-laws, and then compare his relationship to the other brother-in-law's sibling's spouse - the color changes yet again.

So - color changes indicate "connections" by marriage but not actually "blood" relatives.

Hope that I did that explanation justice...

d

Patrick,

One more thing to consider when explaining this...

Sometimes you may actually have multiple relationships to a given profile. Geni "caches" the relationship - it kind of remembers the last path it calculated. So - it is possible that you might have a closer relationship then it shows. For instance, I've got relatives where cousins married cousins so that a single person might be related to me on both my mother and father's side. In that case it might so the relationship to a given cousin from my mother's side for instance - and the person gets a color change - even though I know on my father's side they are a cousin related by blood. But - later - after I've moved around on the tree looking at my father's side - and I come back - it will have recalculated it. So - don't be discouraged or confused if you seem to have "changing" colors when you look at the same person on a different day... At first that kind of drove me crazy - its correct, but its sometimes not very intuitive to follow...

d

Donald
Thank you perhaps I was reading to much into it.
Patrick