Permission Boundaries in MyBloodlines

Everything you can see and change in MyBloodlines is decided by one rule. It isn’t a setting someone toggles for you, and it isn’t tied to who created a profile first. It follows directly from where you actually sit in the bloodline graph. That rule is your permission boundary, and it’s worth understanding precisely, because it explains why you can record your grandmother’s story but not your sister-in-law’s, and why your spouse can see relatives you can’t.

The rule, stated exactly

Your permission boundary is:

everyone with whom you share a common ancestor, plus the other-side parents of those people.

Two parts, and both matter.

Everyone you share a common ancestor with. Start at your own claimed profile and walk the graph upward to any ancestor, then back down. Everyone you can reach that way shares a common ancestor with you: your parents and their parents, your children and grandchildren, your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your nieces and nephews, however many generations out the recorded graph goes. This is your blood family — the people connected to you purely through recorded parent-child links.

Plus the other-side parents of those people. Almost everyone in that first set has two parents, and one of them may have married in from a completely different bloodline. That married-in parent is an other-side parent, and they’re inside your boundary too. This is the part people miss, so it’s worth making concrete.

A worked example

Say the recorded graph around you includes your grandmother, your father, your aunt (your father’s sister), and your two cousins (your aunt’s children).

Your grandmother, father, aunt, and cousins all share a common ancestor with you, so they’re all inside your boundary.
Your cousins have a second parent — your aunt’s husband, who married into the family from his own bloodline. You share no common ancestor with him, but he is the other-side parent of your cousins, who are inside your boundary. So he is inside your boundary too.
The same logic covers your own marriage. Your child shares a common ancestor with you (you). Your child’s other parent — your spouse — is that child’s other-side parent, which is exactly why you can see and record your spouse in the first place.

Who is outside your boundary

The rule adds other-side parents, but it stops there — it doesn’t keep walking up into their families. That’s what draws the line at the people you’d think of as “related by marriage but not by blood”:

Your in-laws — your spouse’s parents. Your spouse is inside your boundary (as your child’s other-side parent), but the boundary does not extend to their parents. You share no common ancestor with your in-laws, and they aren’t an other-side parent of anyone you do, so they fall outside. (What to do about that is covered in how to add my in-laws in MyBloodlines?.)
Your uncle-by-marriage’s parents and siblings — his own bloodline, one step past him.
A cousin’s spouse and that spouse’s family — reachable only by stepping off your blood line and then up into someone else’s.

None of these are hidden as a punishment. They simply belong to a different bloodline, whose own members hold the same kind of boundary you do.

What the boundary actually governs

Your boundary defines two things at once: what you can see and what you can contribute to. Within it, you can open profiles, read the stories and photos connected to those people, and — if you’re recording rather than viewing only — add relatives, write stories, and attach photos. Structurally, edits can’t reach outside it, which is what keeps one relative from quietly rewriting a branch of the shared graph they have no standing in. The reason the graph can be reasoned about this cleanly is that it’s built only from parent-child links, with every other relationship derived from them — see why MyBloodlines only records parent-child ties. The practical payoff is a family record no stranger can reach — the wider how-to is in how to keep your family tree private, and it’s the opposite of a public worldwide tree like the one behind FamilySearch.

Seeing past your boundary

The boundary isn’t a wall you can never see over — it’s the default, not the limit. If you want to see into someone else’s boundary, such as your spouse’s side of the family, they can grant you view access: read-only visibility into their boundary, given deliberately and revocable at any time. It never lets you edit their side, and it doesn’t merge the two bloodlines. How that works in practice is covered in how can I see my spouse’s bloodline history in MyBloodlines?. And once you understand boundaries, the rules around editing — deleting a relationship and removing a user’s access — follow directly from them.

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