Originally published 27 August 2019
Wolfram Alpha has a little program that calculates family relationships. For example, in the top left hand box I typed in grandfather’s brother’s cousin’s son and he would be my second cousin once removed. We are one generation removed, four generations to a common ancestor and have 0.78125% blood relationship.
So while the calculator is good with blood relationships, it doesn’t seem able to handle the relationships when the research goes off on non-blood relation tangents.
At FamilySearch I contacted a researcher who’d added some information to the record for my husband’s aunt and I asked how she was related. She is a kindred heart who just keeps putting the connections together even though it takes her way off her bloodline. I put aunt’s husband’s father’s father’s mother’s sister’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter into the Wolfram Alpha calculator and got great grandmother which isn’t right. Ancestry has a better calculator. I added the names into my husband’s family spiderweb (you can’t call it a tree) but even Ancestry couldn’t keep up.
Update: It took a day but Ancestry has determined that she is the 3rd cousin of my husband’s aunt’s husband.