You Gotta Love Computers, or A Shirttail Relation

As you may know, Michelle and I somehow got appointed as the keepers of family history, lore, and photographs in my family. I’m pretty sure the vote took place when I wasn’t present…

But duty is duty and so we took it on. My Mom had done a lot of work on genealogy when I was a kid, and we had all her papers. But being children of the late 20th Century, we elected to go digital. We’ve been using Family Tree Maker for an embarrassingly long time.

My saintly wife took on the burden of data entry, as well as a lot of the ongoing research. Over the years since she took on the project we’ve been able to add a lot of people to the family tree, and some of the branches reach pretty far. We currently have 4,122 names in FTM, and I suspect we’re missing some of the most recent births.

So we’ve ended up with some people whose relationship to me or Michelle is distant, to say the least. And FTM can figure out exactly how any person in the database is related to me. Which can really help when you’ve got over 4100 names to deal with.

In the course of looking for subjects for a Friday post, we came across the birthday of someone I had never heard of. So we clicked the button to see how they were related to me. Here’s the result.

Grand-niece of wife of uncle of wife of brother-in-law of brother-in-law of second cousin once removed of Walt.

Mom used to call that a “shirt-tail relation”.