How can I see my spouse's bloodline history in MyBloodlines?
You can see your spouse’s profile, because your shared child makes him or her an other-side parent inside your permission boundary. But your spouse’s side of the family — his or her parents, grandparents, siblings, and the stories and photos attached to them — sits inside your spouse’s boundary, not yours. You share no common ancestor with those ancestors, so by default they aren’t visible to you. Seeing them is a deliberate act on your spouse’s part: he or she grants you view access.
What view access is
View access is read-only visibility into someone else’s permission boundary. When your spouse grants it to you, you can open the profiles in his or her boundary, read the stories, and look at the photos — exactly as if you were browsing your own side, except you can’t change anything. You can’t add relatives to that side, edit those profiles, or write into those stories. It’s visibility, not contribution.
A few things follow from that:
- It’s directional. Your spouse granting you view access lets you see his or her side. It doesn’t automatically let your spouse see yours; that would be a separate grant, made the same way.
- It’s deliberate. It doesn’t happen by matching or by accident. Your spouse chooses to grant it, and can revoke it later.
- It doesn’t change who’s related to whom. View access changes who is allowed to look, not what’s recorded. (Recording an actual relationship between the two sides is a different action — see how to add a child when parents are from different bloodlines.)
How to actually get it
The steps are short, but the order matters.
Step 1: You request access from your spouse’s profile
Open your spouse’s profile and click Request Access Grant in the options at the top. That sends your spouse a request to open his or her side of the family to you.
Step 2: Your spouse approves the request
Your spouse receives that request and goes to the Grants tab on the Access & Requests page, where he or she approves it. Nothing on that side becomes visible until this approval happens — it’s the deliberate step on your spouse’s side.
Step 3: You browse that side, read-only
Once approved, you can browse your spouse’s side by selecting your spouse as the granting person on the graph, stories, and photos pages. Each of those views then shows his or her data alongside your own — open a profile, follow it to a story, follow the story to a photo and the other people in it. You just can’t edit any of it.
Why it’s built this way
The default in MyBloodlines is that each person sees their own permission boundary and no further. View access exists so that broader visibility is possible without weakening that default: your spouse can show you his or her whole side without handing over the ability to change it, and without anything about how the two of you are related being changed. If what you actually want is to help build out that side rather than just see it, that’s a different situation — covered in how to add my in-laws in MyBloodlines?.
Start recording your bloodline Claim your profile and begin at MyBloodlines →