I have a NPC who is massively involved in horse breeding, including magical horses, so he is interested in tracking bloodlines and ancestry. The bloodline target only works down the family tree, not up:
A bloodline is all the people descended by blood from a given person, the immediate target. Only the immediate target need be within the spell’s range, but all members of the bloodline are affected immediately.
So is there any way using Hermetic magic to find the parent (or the bones of the parent) of a specific target who is not within the range of the caster's senses?
(Barring finding the Garden of Eden, acquiring arcane connections to the equines there--and leave without getting kicked out--and then use the bloodline target on the original horses created by God. Because, 1) hard, and 2) let's not mess with the Divine.)
The Ancient Magic book includes Fertility Magic and the Arcane Ability Fertility Lore (p55).
There's an example of Fertility Lore which goes "to identify a character’s grandparent the Ease Factor is 8 (3, + 2 two generations apart, + 3 exact relationship)".
Thank you for the suggestions, but I believe that both of these suggestions require the targets to be within sense range. The Fertility Lore skill only compares targets in the user's physical presence, likely sight range at best. The formulaic spells can compare the present group to a third person represented by an arcane connection, but they do not compare present targets to an unknown relative neither present nor represented by an arcane connection. We're running into the Limit of Arcane Connections, so it's probably going to require a non-Hermitic magic system or a mystery virtue.
It's possible with Faerie magic, using Merinita's Symbolic Magic mystery, but it requires a ritual, which would quickly become expensive in terms of vis. (Though I suppose the Merinita engaged for the task could look for the most distant ancestor the magic it can find, and then just use the far more vis friendly bloodline target to find the descendants.)
The same problem would occur if someone investigated Defixio Magic and made a breakthrough for the Unlimited range. And horses don't have souls, so necromancy is out. In an ideal world, the Amazon Magic range "Unseen Stranger" would probably be the best choice, not requiring a ritual or vis, but, Amazons.
First of all, it's not 100% clear to me that a child can't work as a Arcane Connection to the parent. Remember that the examples given on ArM5 p.84 are just examples. The general rule is:
Something, the connection, is an Arcane Connection to something else, the target, if the
connection was very closely associated with the target, often by being a part of it.
If a wound is enough to act as as an Arcane Connection to whomever inflicted it (see Image of the Beast), it makes sense that a child can serve as an Arcane Connection to the parents.
Furthermore, let's be clear about the meaning of "finding" in this context. Learning who is the parent of a given horse (by learning enough information to identify it if known or when met) is well within the scope of Hermetic magic: ancestry is a property of the child. In fact, it's certainly within the scope of Mundane Astrology (i.e. Artes Liberales) as per A&A p.74:
Who is the maker of the object N? ...the horoscope of an object will reveal identifying information about its maker - his complexion (and thus his approximate appearance), occupation, interests, and present location. This is not a question about the past, since the maker is a present property of the object interrogated. (Base 4, +3 Thorough)