The Cousin Game: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt “Unusual Source”

 Breaking Brick Walls with a Family Search “Game”

            When I installed the Family Search app on my phone, I never expected it to lead to clues that would help break down “brick walls” in my research—sometimes even brick walls that I hadn’t even discovered yet. And it was due to what my genealogy society jokingly calls the “cousin game”—truly an unusual source of information.

            The “cousin game” is actually called “Relatives Around Me”. FamilySearch describes it as follows:

“Have you ever sat in a room full of people and wondered if or how you might be related to those around you? Relatives Around Me, a fun feature in the FamilySearch Family Tree app, can tell you how you are related to friends, neighbors, or anyone sitting near you. To try Relatives Around Me, you and your potential cousin both need to be signed in to the Family Tree app and within approximately 100 feet of each other. (To download the app, click iOS or Android.)

Once you have signed in, select More at the bottom right of the screen (iOS) or the drop-down in the top left (Android), and then select Relatives Around Me. This option opens a page with a green button that says “Scan for Friends.”

  

Tap the green button to start scanning. Anyone else who taps the green button and is within range will show up in a list on your device, and you will show up on theirs. Selecting the person’s name will bring up a pedigree graphic showing your common ancestor and the lines through which you both descend.”

The pedigree graphics from both programs are valuable, as they show ancestors not only from your own tree, but also from the FamilySearch wiki. That’s how brick walls are breached: someone else working on a shared ancestor has made a connection a step or two further up a shared branch of the tree. You can then take that information and attempt to verify it and build upon it. Here is an example of a pedigree graphic:

            Of course not all the information on these pedigree charts turns out to be accurate. People in the wiki make mistakes. Every new ancestor I discover through this program must be verified before I add them to my tree. Some have turned out to be false leads. But others have pointed me in the right direction, and helped me find new ancestors.

Recent COVID era innovations have allowed for socially distant, remote scanning—my genealogy society’s DNA Special Interest Group, for example, set up a remote “Relatives Finder” session, and I discovered I had several extremely distant cousins in the group. “Relatives Finder” is a similar program to “Relatives Around Me” but is operated by the BYU Family History Technology Lab.

            I am attending the virtual Roots Tech Convention in a few days, and the Roots Tech organizers are going to use the “Relatives Finder” program to link up attendees with any cousins attending the event. Given the huge number of attendees at the virtual event, I expect I will be amazed at the number of new leads I discover. I may be spending the next couple years trying to verify potential new ancestors. I’m looking forward to it! I hope that I can get leads for the parts of my tree that still dead-end just a couple generations back.

Sources:

https://www.relativefinder.org/#/main

https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/relatives/