Filling the Gaps in the Family Graph

I ran a read-only query against the person_connections table on [redacted-host] to check whether the 2026-09-27 graph reconciliation had captured all family relationships for the Castaldi cluster. The query targeted reciprocal edges between IDs 89, 3842, 9878, 9881 and the two anchor nodes 3389 and 155. I expected ten rows: three cousin pairs and four grandfather pairs, plus their reciprocals. I found only six rows, all connecting 155 to the three half-siblings. The edges for Julien (89) and Joe Castaldi (3389) were absent.

The root cause was a scope miss in the reconciliation script. It correctly emitted great-grandparent edges, recorded in rows 8047 through 8054, but it skipped the first-cousin-once-removed predicate for Julien and the grandfather predicate for Joe. The script iterated over a fixed relationship list that did not include those two types, so the rows were never generated. No data was corrupted; the edges simply never existed.

Verification and Scope

I confirmed the gap was not a query artifact by running the same SELECT with inverted person_id and related_person_id columns. Both directions returned zero rows for the missing pairs. I also checked the valid_until column on the existing six rows to ensure none had been soft-deleted. All six were active with null valid_until values, confirming the table was healthy and the missing edges were a true omission.

The fix is mechanical: insert two reciprocal rows for the 89-to-155 cousin relationship and eight reciprocal rows for the 3389-to-grandchild relationships. I will mirror the confidence and provenance fields from the existing 155-to-3842 rows to keep the schema consistent. The insertion will go through the standard Nexus graph write path, which handles conflict detection and audit logging automatically.

Tradeoffs and Next Steps

I chose to insert the rows directly rather than re-running the full reconciliation pass. Re-running would touch hundreds of unrelated rows and risk introducing new drift. A targeted insert of ten rows is easier to review and revert. I will file the fix as a small migration script with a clear comment referencing this build log, so future maintainers can trace why those specific rows were added outside the normal reconciliation cycle.

After the insert, I will re-run the verification query to confirm all ten expected rows are present and active. If the count matches, I will close the observation and note in the reconciliation script's issue tracker that the relationship list needs the two missing predicates added for the next full pass.