How to Navigate and Grow Your Bloodline Graph

The Bloodline Graph is where everything you and your relatives have recorded comes together in one picture: every person exactly once, joined to their parents and children, reaching up and down the generations. It’s also where the bloodline grows. This guide covers both — how to find your way around it, and how to add to it.

Moving around the graph

The graph is always arranged around one person at its center, with their parents above, their children below, and everyone else fanning out from there.

Click a card to bring that person to the center. The whole graph rearranges around them, so you can walk up to a great-grandparent or down to a grandchild one click at a time.
Double-click a card to open that person’s full profile — their details, stories, and photos.
Search for anyone currently in view with the search box at the top, and the graph centers on them.
Recenter on Me brings your own claimed profile back to the middle whenever you’ve wandered off.
Drag to pan, and use the zoom controls in the corner to see more or less of the bloodline at once.

Every card has a menu button (the three dots). It holds everything you can do with that person:

View Profile and Edit Profile
Invite User to Claim — send an invitation to the relative this profile represents, so they can claim it and start recording alongside you
Add Child, Add Mother, and Add Father

If an option is greyed out, hover over it and the reason appears — for example, that a mother is already connected, or that the person sits outside what you can edit.

Adding a parent or child

Choose Add Father, Add Mother, or Add Child from a card’s menu, and you’ll get three ways to complete it:

Choose someone already in the graph. If the relative is already recorded and within your reach, pick them and the relationship is recorded immediately.
Create New Person. If they aren’t recorded yet, create their profile and the relationship in one step.
Connect to an External Person. If the relative belongs to a different bloodline you can’t see — most often your spouse, when you’re adding your shared child — enter their profile ID. That sends a connection request, and the relationship is recorded once someone on their side approves it. The full walkthrough is in how to add a child when parents are from different bloodlines.

When you add a child, you’ll also say whether the person on the card is the child’s father or mother. The Add Person button at the top of the graph does the same job from scratch: it creates a new person and connects them to someone already recorded.

Why you only ever add parents and children

You’ll notice there’s no “Add Sibling” or “Add Spouse”. That’s deliberate. Parent and child is the one relationship that never changes, so it’s the only one you record directly — every other relationship is worked out from it:

Siblings are people who share a parent.
Partners are two people who are parents of the same child.
Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are found by following parent links up and back down.

Because none of these are separate entries, they can never contradict one another, and the graph stays consistent however large it grows. The reasoning is covered in depth in why MyBloodlines only records parent-child ties.

Recording the relationships you’re used to

In practice, every relationship you’d want to record comes down to one or two parent-child links:

Your spouse: add your child, then connect your spouse as the child’s other parent. The partnership follows automatically.
Your sibling: add them as a child of the parent you share.
Grandparents and cousins: add your parents’ parents, then their other children, and so on — one link at a time.
Your in-laws: they belong to your spouse’s side, so your spouse records them. See how to add my in-laws in MyBloodlines?.

Removing a link works the same way in reverse: open a profile, choose Edit under Related People, and break the parent or child link. That’s allowed only along your own direct line, and it can cut off access for everyone on the other side — read how to delete a relationship in MyBloodlines? before you do it.

Why some people can’t be edited

What you can change follows your place in the bloodline, not a setting someone assigns. You can edit and add relatives for people inside your permission boundary — everyone who shares a common ancestor with you, plus the other-side parents of those people. Parents can be added to blood relatives only, and nobody can have more than one father or one mother.

Seeing beyond your own side

If a relative has granted you view access — your spouse, say — a Granting Profiles button appears above the graph. Select their profile and their side of the bloodline joins the view, read-only. How to request that access is covered in how can I see my spouse’s bloodline history in MyBloodlines?.

Start recording your bloodline Claim your profile and begin at MyBloodlines →