Right now it is (almost always) the same set of family members as those appear above. In "Photo View", it looks like this:
How about expanding a little, to include grandparents, grandchildren, and some immediate in-laws? [For instance, the only thing known about someone is his grandfather's name, which is not visible from his profile. For this to be useful though, grandfather needs to be included not just at bottom of profile, but in lists and on hovercards.]
To make it a little smarter, we can decide to include one or not based on whether their dates overlap. For example, if one's
- (great) grandfather died before one was born
- (great) grandchild was born after one had died
- father-in-law died before one was married
- son-in-law married after one has died
- step-mother died before one was born
- step-daughter died before one was married, etc.
we might not wish to display them on the profile page. Sounds complicated to implement, but if we simply calculate the overlap of the life spans of the two persons, and in case of in-laws (non-biological), calculate the three-way overlap of
- birth-death of that person
- birth-death of the focus
- marriage-divorce of the marriage connection between that person and the focus
it should take care of all the scenarios, right?
If any of the dates (years) are missing, don't include it on the profile page, so as to tell the user "please fill out relevant dates".
Afterthought: how about ordering the profiles by the number of years they overlap with me? I have no idea what the logic in the current list is. Barring some AI system that can predict who is likely to be "closer", this may be the simplest metric? (It would favor siblings over parents and children, though.)