How do you find relationship of two people when one is not you?

A Pro user like you can use the green push-pin method.
If you take a closer look every none-user profile you have access to have a green pushpin in the upper right corner of the profile. Push it and any relationship shown on other profiles you open after this will be relative to that profile. Push it again on any profile to reset it.

I just got a comment that even without using the green pushpin method that in a relationship between two people one of them are never you (unless if you try to find out that you are related you yourself) ;-)
Anyhow, I assumed and answered on how to find a relationship when the start point is not you.

Thanks. That totally works.

I have looked at the green needle, and have tried to use it with my close relatives, but it can not find any kinship with others who I'm related to! so it is not reliable. At least those I have tested.

I think if you are not connected to the big tree and are only in an isolated family tree you will not see many connections. For a long time I was not able to see connections and then worked on going back farther and adding people farther back on my tree and then amazing connections were made. I did some of the research outside of GENI by doing web searches.

have I missed something!, how do i connect into the big tree?

I am not the best one to explain this. For me it was adding more to my tree and going back in time and eventually I got connected. If you are of English, Irish or scots descent it is easier to find information on line to build your tree going back.

http://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Big_Tree

Hi Tony,

You are connected to the big tree already, at least peripherally. You can infer this from your home page, where the Statistics module on the right says "You are connected to 63,442,685 people on Geni." What this means is that at some point a profile in your tree was merged with a profile that was already in the big tree. It might be a connection at one of your ancestors or it might be through half a dozen marriage lines. As I'm not able to find a relationship path from me to you, I suspect it's the latter.

cheers,

Mike at Geni

Tony Hole is your first cousin once removed's husband's third cousin's ex-husband's second cousin.
You find the connection point in the path between us: http://geni.com/Rz2Xs

Well, I have tried this long time now, and it works.
What I mean in this debate are (although I obviously connected to the big tree) For example, I am related to Carl von linne, but not my son.
And then I have been using the green needle.
In other words, the green needle is not always reliable.

Your path to Carl Linnaeus was obviously a cached path, and when I tried to refresh it the connection was not found. Some line must be broken somewhere.

It was just one example. And it happens quite often with several of my close relatives.
I mean that it does not always work, the little green needle.
For about 14 days ago, I was a relative with over 100,000 on the bloodline here on geni, this lasted about 10 days to suddenly just disappear one day. Then I thought this program was mostly a joke.
BTW it looks lik Iam still related to http://www.geni.com/path/Tony+Hole+is+related+to+Carl+von+Linn%C3%A...
Then it is still a cached path.

Many times when i surf around the different profiles, to see how they are related to each other, it shows that the parents are related, but not the children.

I think that Geni always tries to show the shortest way between profiles. Geni does not take any notice if the connection is via blood-lines or via marriage.

Often I´ve found that a marriage-line between a relative and myself turns into a blood-line when I pin my son to the same relative.

Björn, it seems that we are not related to each other, when I press update, it shows that we are not related, but Iam related to your parents?
Or is it just a a cached path?
it has been for several days now.
Hmm, wonder if geni is a bit random?

Not random, Tony, but there is a point past which our search algorithm will not find a relationship path. It's entirely possible that this point stops for you at Bjørn's parents. (The good news is that if you can get a path to Bjørn's mother or father, just follow the link from their profile to Bjørn's, and Geni will extend the path for you)

MIke it makes no sense when someone is my 12th great grandmother and her mother is not, and follows some circuitous path that says she is some involved cousin so many times removed. I think the path algorithm should always default to grandparents. Then there should be a button that lets you explore other paths. It could actually display how many paths there are to a particular person. I understand anyone person could have multiple relationships with one person. It seems to me a grandparent would be a primary pathway.I think these would be good improvements to geni.

Vicki in the case of the 12th / 13th great grandparents you cite, most likely the circuitous path was found before that person was merged into the position of 13th great grandparent -- Geni would certainly find that before anything else. The only other possibility I can think of, would be that you followed profile links along that circuitous path, thereby storing that path in our servers. In either case, however, after a week you should be able to use the refresh icon (opposing arrows) at the end of the short description, to get the more-direct path.

Oh wow, thanks!