Relatives at Rootstech 2023

Relatives at Rootstech is now live for 2023! Yesterday I received an e-mail from FamilySearch telling me Relatives at Rootstech is happening this year, and of course, I immediately opted in and went to explore.

This feature was designed so that when you attended Rootstech you could meet your cousins you didn’t know yet. The app looked at your ancestors from the FamilySearch tree and found paths to as many others who also opted in as possible Last year they found me 4,189 cousins.

So far this year I have 533 cousins, and that number is growing rapidly! My closest cousin so far is a 3rd cousin twice removed, and the furthest cousins listed are 8th cousins once removed. I suspect that is the furthest that they will report cousins.

You can see your cousins sorted by either Location, Ancestor or Family Line.

Location

The Location sorting goes by country. So far I have 389 in the USA, 61 in Canada, 1 from Australia, 1 from Italy and 1 from the United Kingdom.

Ancestor

The Ancestor sorting shows me a huge list of Ancestors followed by the number of cousins in “Relatives at Rootstech”. My highest so far is my 7th great-grandmother Marie Francoise Mandeville, with 36 cousins listed. I find this a very handy sorting method, as it lets me check my relationship with each cousin and make sure I have them on the family tree.

Family Line

The Family Line sorting lets you choose which parent or grandparent you want to see cousins from. Oddly my maternal grandmother does not appear on this list. I checked my FamilySearch tree, and everything looks ok, so I’m not sure why this is. While writing this, my number of cousins has gone up to 552 (and going up fast!!). My mother has 236, and my father has 321….that clearly totals 557, but there could be overlaps or things are just changing too fast. When I go to the grandparents, my maternal grandfather Lewis has 236, my paternal grandfather Allen has 242, my paternal grandmother has 80, and my maternal grandmother is not listed. All 4 of her grandparents were born in Ireland, but I still feel I should have some cousins from her line on Relatives at Rootstech. Also, I noticed that the cousins from the different lines appear to go out to 9th cousins.

In order for Relatives at Rootstech to work, you need to be in the FamilySearch Family Tree, and your ancestors need to be showing as your ancestors in that tree, so I am off to make sure mine is updated and will write more on that soon.