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Today we had another question: How are people who descend from same person related?

I went to make it a duplicate of the Community Wiki Q&A (Seeking English term for relationship between two members of extended family?) that was established to try and prevent G&FH SE becoming a honey pot for such a frequent question, that comes in many guises, but seems invariably to boil down to one or a few repetitive answers.

I was surprised to see that Seeking English term for relationship between two members of extended family? currently has a net vote of -1 which would make it seem like something we would not want to redirect people to.

I am keen to hear comments as to why people think this might have a net downvote, irrespective of how you may have voted on it (and only three people have - 1 up, 2 down) yourself?

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  • I also noticed that, along with the fact that an older question had been marked as a duplicate of it, which seemed a bit backward...
    – TomH
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 10:19
  • @TomH I would agree that it is far more usual to have a newer question made the duplicate of something that came earlier, but sometimes a much more useful Q&A results from something asked later, before its duplicate nature is realized. That is not the case here where I made some earlier questions duplicates of this Community Wiki Q&A because it was written to provide a clean slate that we could all share ownership of. I'll comment on your answer too because you have raised a good point.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 11:03
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    It seems that all relationship-name or relationship-calculation questions are being marked as duplicates, i.e. a single set of answers will cover ALL the variations. I find that hard to believe, but also see that similar resources have been referenced for those answers supplied so far.
    – bgwiehle
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 15:27

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I'm probably slightly biased here because one of the other questions involved is How to determine relationship with a cousin? whose accepted answer is one of my most upvoted answers but it strikes me that one problem may be that this question seems to be trying to replace a number of older established questions.

Another problem is that the first answer is an abstruse essay on linguistics rather than a practical answer to the question most people seem to ask, in other words "what is the name of the relationship between X and Y".

So whilst it's technically correct that the answer to that question is not really very important in the grand scheme of things, and the far more tricky question for a genealogist is determining what a named relationship in a historical source means, it's not actually what beginners or non-genealogically inclined people tend to ask.

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  • Undermining the value of that excellent Q&A was an unfortunate, and unintended consequence, of how I create the CW Q&A, for which I apologize. I've just re-opened that, and recommended it within the CW Q&A as being the place to look to work out cousins and removes. I hope this may be more in line with your thinking. Let me know if you think any other similarly valuable Q&As have been undermined.
    – PolyGeo Mod
    Commented Sep 26, 2015 at 11:14

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