Help talk:Cousins and ancestors

More explanation of detail (copied from Forum:SMW)

Couple ancestors and Person1 display a list of common ancestors reverse ordered by year-of-birth-as-string.

The list of Descendants at the bottom of the page displays as first child, first child of first child, first child of first child of first child, second child of first child of first child, second child of first child, third child of first child, first child of third child of first child, and so on.

On the iterations, the ahnentafel and descendant list are emergent features. With every save, they copy information from the parents' and the children's pages -- and that information is different every time the parents' and the children's pages are saved.

More concretely, when I first ran Couple ancestors on Beatrijs' page, there was no relationship with her husband, the awful Floris. I knew that was not true, because some 300 years earlier another Count of Holland had married another daughter of a Count of Flanders and both dynasties were uninterrupted for a very long time. So I opened and saved the pages of the patrilineal ancestors of both Bea and Floor until Couple ancestors showed a relationship: 11th cousins. When you had a look, many hours later, someone had re-saved the page of Gertrud von Sachsen who first married a Count of Holland and then a Count of Flanders. This information was added, and that is what you found (and I at first thought was a bug).

So, while SMW is pretty powerful, it takes time for information to propagate and answers to queries evolve over time. To go back to the story of Bea and Floor, both dynasties married into royal family of France and into the ducal family of Brabant (and those two families intermarried as well). None of this information is up on Familypedia, but if and when it is uploaded, we will probably find a closer relationship between the two. rtol 06:53, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


 * So the information that is built up at each save comes from some (presumably rather new) ahnentafel and descendant templates and goes to (changing) the "Facts" at the bottom of the page? Can we start putting those templates (whatever they are) on our own ancestors' pages to watch what happens?  — Robin Patterson (Talk) 07:37, 31 May 2009 (UTC)