# Tools: search the patriarchs

This tool searches the most remote ancestor in each investigated family tree. GEDKeeper searches through different families in the database and chooses a male from each family that has no parents and has a specified number of descendant generations. When an ancestor has an unspecified year of birth, this year is evaluated automatically based on the year of birth of the closest descendant. Such rough calculations are made for evaluation only. For each patriarch GEDKeeper calculates the number of generations and number of descendants.

Before you begin to work with this search, you must define the length of a target family branch. For example, if you need all patriarchs that have at least three descendant generations, enter this number in the "Generations of not less than" field. Press the "Search" button and this tool will find all matching patriarchs.

The "Ignore dates" option forces GEDKeeper to not to calculate the birthday of a patriarch. In this case, patriarchs without a defined birthday will have "-1" as the year of birth.

A person with the "patriarch label" has a "[*]" symbol before his name (see Label for an individual record).

You can use "Set a sign" to set the "patriarch label" and stay in the current tool—without changing to the person editor window.

The "Chart" button displays a "Graph of interconnections between patriarchs". To reduce the number of vertices in the graph, it is recommended to set a large enough number of patriarch's descendant generations before viewing the diagram. After the diagram has been built and stabilized, you can see patriarchs on the diagram as dark-blue vertices, and intersections of their descendants' branches as lilac vertices. A digital signature on a node is a family identifier. Hovering the mouse over a vertex shows the name of the family in this node. Arrows are directed from an ancestor's family to a descendant's one, where two relations intersect.