Maria kickers x 3

Really fascinating and unique!

Nice work Coenraadt :)

So unique! After puzzling over why Geni would only sometimes have him as a direct grandson of Ferdinandus Appel, b2 and other times as an indirect relative, Coenraadt Jacobus Moolman contacts me. He points out further that his granny-Maria Botha, SM/PROG 's - son - Theunis Botha - was sometimes his grandfather; sometimes his uncle.

So, I go and take a look, thinking it must be a Geni glitch, or he's connecting to a ghost duplicate in the wrong tree after we sorted out the famous DNA Botha/Appel case involving Ferdinandus Appel, b2 actually fathering Theunis Botha - not Friedrich Both, SV/PROG 1. (For more on this interesting case - check the http://www.geni.com/projects/Bothas-who-are-DNA-descendants-of-Ferd... Project.)

But then I see that Maria Botha, SM/PROG is the granny no matter what.
Would you believe: Coenraadt is descended as a direct grandchild from both of Maria Kickers' men (on different lines)! The Botha and the Appel Stamvaders are his grandfathers with Maria as the grandmother in both cases. How unique is that? :-)
And then Coenraadt used the HistoryLink App to find a third direct descent line from her!! What a great story.

In case it's useful to other SA users - as our tree often has 'interbreeding' because of the bottleneck of European Settlers - so this question does come up - I summarised the bits of the conversation that might be useful. I'm sure most of you know this anyway, and some might be able to comment on my non-tekkie explanation (nevermind the Afrikaans).

There are two ways of seeing the descendant lines:

1) <Go To> on Tree View of YOUR Tree
=Shew - en dit is die antwoord. Jy is 'n direkte afstammeling van beide van Maria Kickers se manne - deur verskillende paaie. Geni sal jou net een op 'n enkele tyd wys
- maar as jy jou profiel oopmaak in tree view vir ongeveer 10 geslagte (Klik op die voorkeur blok vir <direct ancestors only>) en dan die tab wat sê <Go To>
Nou kan jy klik op die naam en dit sal jou die pad na hulle op die boom wys. (Insluitend jou oupa / oom Theunis Botha)
Wow, man, dit is uniek! En 'n goeie storie. :-)=

2. The Green Drawing Pin on Profile View
=Ek swap na Engels toe omdat ek weet nie hoe om jou so goed die tegniese aspekte in Afrikaans te vertel. Jammer:
Whichever relationship line is showing at any one time is likely to be related to which part of your family you were working on before you looked at it, and whether Geni is showing you a cached (saved to short term memory) copy of the last time you checked it, rather than actually recalculating the relationship from scratch.
It is also a function (as Daan Botes pointed out) of which relationship is the shortest. (so if you’re 8th gr grandson to Maria’s one sex partner, and 7th gr grandson to her other – the programme is likely to preference the 7th gr grandson connection to her & him.)

You should actually be able to prompt the programme to show you both lines - one after the other - by using a combination of
a) the green 'drawing pin' on the right side of the profile (where the relationship path shows up) - which will show you a path between two profiles
and
b) the arrows that go round and round right next to the summary that says, for eg "Coenraadt etc is so and so's 10th grandson". Clicking on that forces the programme to recalculate the relationship path instead of just bringing up an old cached copy of the path.

In my experience this is quite a 'buggy' part of the Geni programming, and 9 times out of 10, when combined with SA internet speed, is just not worth persevering to get right - for a relationship you already know is there.
Easier to just 'walk the tree' yourself. :-)

Thanks for your help Sharon,Your a star!