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Visualizing Family Relationships with Relationship Diagrams and Color Coding

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Daniella Levy

Visualizing Family Relationships with Relationship Diagrams and Color Coding

As you build your family tree and add more and more relatives, the family relationships on your tree are likely to become more and more complex. Even if you’ve managed to master the convoluted system of cousin relationship terminology, you still may find it difficult to remember exactly how a particular distant family member is related to you or to someone else in your family — let alone explain it to someone else!

It’s much easier to understand relationships when you chart them out visually. The purpose of the traditional family tree chart is to help visualize the connections between family members. However, that chart will become more unwieldy and difficult to follow as its branches spread.

For this reason, MyHeritage offers a few free, simple ways to visualize the relationships between people in your family tree more easily: the relationship report feature, relationship diagrams, and color coding.

Relationship report

The free relationship report feature allows you to generate diagrams for any relationship between two individuals in your family tree (provided you are associated with it). Relationship reports can be especially useful to take along to family reunions or when interviewing an older family member.

To access the relationship report feature, hover over the “Family tree” tab in the navigation bar on your family site, click “More” at the bottom of the menu, and select “Relationship report” from the extended menu.

Accessing the free relationship report feature on MyHeritage
Accessing the relationship report feature on MyHeritage

On the relationship report page, simply begin typing the names of the individuals whose relationship you wish to view in the “Person 1” and “Person 2” boxes and select them from the list that appears. A chart will appear below detailing the relationship step by step:

Relationship report
Relationship report

Your name will appear in the “Person 1” box by default. To choose someone else, hover over the box and click the X that appears.

Entering a different person into the relationship report feature
Entering a different person into the relationship report feature

By default, only the basic details of the individuals on the chart will be displayed. You can choose to display more details by opening the Details menu on the upper right and selecting “Full” instead of “Basic.” The full detail view includes each person’s places of birth and death in addition to their dates of birth and death.

Click the download icon on the upper right to save the diagram to your computer as a PDF file. This makes it convenient to share the file via email. You can also print the chart by clicking the print icon.

Full relationship diagram, saved as a PDF
Full relationship diagram, saved as a PDF

Accessing relationship diagrams from your family tree

You can also access a relationship diagram charting your relationship to a given relative directly from their profile panel when viewing your family tree (again, provided you are associated with the tree). When you open their profile panel, their relationship to you appears below their name, underlined with a dotted line. Simply click it to open the relationship diagram.

Profile panel on MyHeritage family tree with relationship highlighted
Your relationship to an individual in your tree appears under their name in the profile panel

A pop-up appears displaying the diagram:

Relationship diagram pop-up
Relationship diagram pop-up

You can print this chart by clicking the printer icon on the top right corner. Clicking the pencil icon takes you to the Relationship report feature, which we’ll explore below.

Color coding

Color coding displays the direct ancestors of each branch of your family tree in a different color. This allows you to understand at a glance what side of the family a given ancestor is on.

Color coding is available on the Family view and Pedigree view of your family tree, applied to the family tree you’re associated with. The color scheme remains consistent through Fan view and the Family Tree Timeline as well:

  • Blue: paternal grandfather’s side
  • Green: paternal grandmother’s side
  • Red: maternal grandfather’s side
  • Yellow: maternal grandmother’s side
  • Purple: your descendants

To enable color coding, click the palette icon on the lower right side of the screen. A pop-up will appear including a legend describing which color is assigned to each branch in the tree. Click the checkbox at the bottom of the pop-up to enable color coding for this family tree view.

Enabling color coding for Family view
Enabling color coding for Family view

You can also enable color coding on the mobile version of the MyHeritage website. When visiting your tree on mobile web, tap the settings icon on the upper right corner and select the “Use color coding” option.

Try these features on MyHeritage

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