Complex Families - part two: Simon Orde
Posted: 12 Sep 2003 13:38
Dear Simon I have also tried to get a similar effect & have failed. Here is my situation. A couple married, but the woman already had an illegitimate child to someone else. She then died & the husband remarried. His second wife also had an illegitimate child. I want to show a chart with both illegitimate children on, but choosing an all-relatives chart of one couple will only show one of the children depending on which wife I choose as part of the couple. I can see the reason both illegitimate children aren't shown is that they are not actually blood relatives, nevertheless, they were brought up as part of the same family & in fact were closer than their real half-siblings. What is needed is the ability to choose an all-relatives chart based on THREE people. Is this a possibility? (I know at the moment it isn't). I look forward to your comments.
There are 2 ways of approaching the problem:
(1) If you want to treat the illegitimate children you speak of as belonging to different families (albeit closely related ones), you want a complex diagram that will show them all together. Some of our plans for the future would hopefully let you do this, but don't expect anything on this soon.
(2) The alternative, however, would be to say that the 2 illegitimate children were actually de facto members of the husband's 2 families (well perhaps the first was a de facto member of both, and the second was a de facto member of his second family).
To illustrate this, let us call the husband H, his first wife W1 and his second wife W2. The 2 children will be C1 and C2. In that case, you could represent the situation by having just 2 family records as follows:
(a) Husband=H, Wife=W1, Child=C1 (b) Husband=H, Wife=W2, Child=C1, Child=C2
There is no problem about giving a child more than one parent family.
What isn't made clear from this, of course, is that neither C1 nor C2 is the natural child of H. At present, you can qualify the parent-child relationship to indicate that a child is birth, adopted, foster or 'sealed' (the last is a Mormon church thing). [To add these qualifications, find the child's record and select the 'All' tab. Then right click on 'Parent Family' and add 'Relationship'.] However, these options aren't really enough for 2 reasons: (i) C1 is the birth child of W1 but not of H. So how do you represent that? (ii) C1 may actually never have been officially adopted or fostered. In fact, H might even have believed that C1 was his own, and brought him up as such.
For this reason, the plan is to allow you to qualify parent-child relationships to show that a parent-child relationship is 'de facto', which should cover everthing, hopefully. And you will also be able to qualify it twice, to indicate that the parent-child relationship is 'birth' with respect to the mother (say), but de facto (or whatever) with respect to the father. Hopefully these additional qualifiers should be included in release 2.2.
Incidentally, if you wanted to, there would be nothing to stop you adding 2 more family records, to record more information about the circumstances of C1 or C2's birth, if you wanted to. e.g.:
(c) Husband=?, Wife=W1, Child=C1 (d) Husband=?, Wife=W2, Child=C2
Remember that although family records invariably refer to the male parent as the 'Husband' and the female parent as 'Wife', there is no requirement that they actually be married.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer
There are 2 ways of approaching the problem:
(1) If you want to treat the illegitimate children you speak of as belonging to different families (albeit closely related ones), you want a complex diagram that will show them all together. Some of our plans for the future would hopefully let you do this, but don't expect anything on this soon.
(2) The alternative, however, would be to say that the 2 illegitimate children were actually de facto members of the husband's 2 families (well perhaps the first was a de facto member of both, and the second was a de facto member of his second family).
To illustrate this, let us call the husband H, his first wife W1 and his second wife W2. The 2 children will be C1 and C2. In that case, you could represent the situation by having just 2 family records as follows:
(a) Husband=H, Wife=W1, Child=C1 (b) Husband=H, Wife=W2, Child=C1, Child=C2
There is no problem about giving a child more than one parent family.
What isn't made clear from this, of course, is that neither C1 nor C2 is the natural child of H. At present, you can qualify the parent-child relationship to indicate that a child is birth, adopted, foster or 'sealed' (the last is a Mormon church thing). [To add these qualifications, find the child's record and select the 'All' tab. Then right click on 'Parent Family' and add 'Relationship'.] However, these options aren't really enough for 2 reasons: (i) C1 is the birth child of W1 but not of H. So how do you represent that? (ii) C1 may actually never have been officially adopted or fostered. In fact, H might even have believed that C1 was his own, and brought him up as such.
For this reason, the plan is to allow you to qualify parent-child relationships to show that a parent-child relationship is 'de facto', which should cover everthing, hopefully. And you will also be able to qualify it twice, to indicate that the parent-child relationship is 'birth' with respect to the mother (say), but de facto (or whatever) with respect to the father. Hopefully these additional qualifiers should be included in release 2.2.
Incidentally, if you wanted to, there would be nothing to stop you adding 2 more family records, to record more information about the circumstances of C1 or C2's birth, if you wanted to. e.g.:
(c) Husband=?, Wife=W1, Child=C1 (d) Husband=?, Wife=W2, Child=C2
Remember that although family records invariably refer to the male parent as the 'Husband' and the female parent as 'Wife', there is no requirement that they actually be married.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer