How to delete a relationship in MyBloodlines?

Deleting a relationship in MyBloodlines means removing a parent-child link from the bloodline graph. It’s occasionally necessary — a link recorded in error, a branch attached to the wrong person — but it’s one of the most consequential things you can do to a shared graph, and it’s deliberately limited in where it’s allowed. Understand both the limit and the consequence before you use it.

You can only delete relationships on your direct line

Relationship deletion is allowed only along your own direct line of ancestors or descendants — the chain that runs straight up from you (your parent, their parent, and so on) and straight down (your child, their child, and so on). You can cut a link that sits on that line: between you and a parent, between two of your direct ancestors, between you and a child, between a child and a grandchild.

You cannot delete a relationship that sits off that line. The clearest example: you cannot cut the relationship between your uncle and your cousin. Your uncle isn’t your direct ancestor and your cousin isn’t your direct descendant — that link belongs to their part of the graph, not yours. The restriction exists so that no one can modify parts of the shared graph they don’t stand on. Everyone is confined to editing their own line, which is what keeps a single shared bloodline safe to leave open to many contributors. It’s the same principle as your permission boundary, applied to deletion specifically.

Deleting a relationship is a dangerous action

A parent-child link isn’t just a line on a chart — it’s often the only thing making one side of the family visible to the other. Cutting it changes the graph immediately, and the effect on access is immediate too.

The moment you delete a relationship, the people on the opposite side of that link lose access to your side, and you lose access to theirs. That loss is total for whatever the link was connecting: not just the people, but the stories and photos on the other side as well. If that relationship was the bridge between two stretches of the family, everything across the bridge goes dark for both sides at once.

The one thing that softens it

Access is only lost if the deleted relationship was the only connection between the two sides. The bloodline graph often connects the same people through more than one path — through a shared descendant, a second recorded link, another branch that loops back around. If another relationship still connects the two sides after the deletion, the people, stories, and photos on the other side remain accessible through that surviving path. So the real question to ask before deleting is: is this link the only thing holding these two parts of the family together? If it is, treat the deletion as permanent removal of access, not a tidy-up.

Deleting relationships is the underlying mechanism behind two other things people often mean to do:

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