Family Historian User Group

neil40 wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2022 08:02

Adrian, with Lorna's permission, I passed on her comments to CP ...

Thanks Neil - in the meantime I worry about my own consistency with the methods that I've used for adoptions so far, so am compiling some investigative queries... (Apparently I have more adoptions in the data than I'd have guessed )

tatewise wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2022 11:34

The Help page 'How to Flag a Child as Adopted, Illegitimate, etc' describes the 'Rel' fields but nothing else about adoption.
The following Help pages also described how adoption can impact other displays, etc.
'Preferences Dialog: Records Window' ~ Indicate where children are adopted, fostered, etc
'Diagram Options Dialog: General Tab' ~ Birth Priority
Other Help pages mention adoption but none refer to the special features of the Adoption Event or its Fact Witnesses.

Yes, the information in the FH Help is certainly fragmented and incomplete. Ideally I think the page on 'How to Flag a Child as Adopted, Illegitimate, etc' should mention that it is also possible to create an adoption fact, and should contain a link to a new page explaining the special features of the adoption fact.

The KB page Recording Children with Foster/Adoptive Parents does at least mention the adoption fact but says only "On the Facts tab add the Adoption Event (there is no standard Foster Event) and enter the usual details, including Source Citations if known." That article says that it was prompted by a forum thread from 2015. I know the page has not been updated for V7 but it makes me think that when the page was first written in 2015 the extra fields for the family details were not displayed on the Facts tab because they are hardly "usual details".

LornaCraig wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2022 10:23

... I would always make the family links first and record the nature of the relationship afterwards, but a new user might think that by creating the adoption event and entering the family details on the facts tab they have finished the job. ...

I'd also do the family links first but I suspect that's habit because that was the only way of doing it once upon a time. Off the top of my head, I suspect that creating the adoption event and entering the family details on the facts tab for that event does cover all the logical data that the family links records. It just happens to go into different data items (logically the same, physically different) leading to a risk of someone assuming that there's no need to do the family links.

LornaCraig wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2022 10:23

... I can see that methods 1 and 2 for recording the adoption need to be separate because some users might want to maintain Gedcom compliance but not use witness roles, while others might use witness roles but not care about Gedcom. But if you use both it would be helpful if FH checked them for compatibility.

Agreed - it would also help if Methods 1 and 2 generated equivalent reports out of the box - as per Neil's original problem.

LornaCraig wrote: ↑

08 Sep 2022 10:23

... And of course method 3, the ‘Rel’ status, is used for recording a variety of other relationships as well as adoption. So it looks as if the three methods have to be separate, but at the expense of creating confusion for new (and not so new) users. ...

Also agreed.

Just to add some of my experience, having written a couple of queries to check through my adoption data, and updated everything to my chosen methods.

Firstly, every adopted child is put into their adoptive family so that they can be seen as one of the Children on their adoptive parents' Individual Property Boxes' Main tab. The relationship held against the child is set to "a" or whatever. (They will also appear in their birth family if I've recorded it in FH).

The issue was then - did I use the Adoption Event with witnesses (Lorna's Method 2) or with the family seen on the Fact tab for the adoption event (Lorna's Method 1)? Basically, as per recommendations above, the witness method is so much more powerful when creating narrative reports, that I went for that.

As usual I adjusted roles, sentences and witness sentences. The 6 original roles for the adoption event appear to be:

• Adoptive Father, Adoptive Mother, Adoptive Parent,
• Birth Father, Birth Mother, Birth Parent

Whether the six roles listed are to be found in data imported from other software, I've no idea, but that seemed to over-egg the pudding for me. I settled on three, viz:

• Adoptive Parent
• Birth Parent
• Adoptive Birthparent

My list assumes no particular need to distinguish between the gender of the adoptive or birth parents, which allows me to have just one sentence instead of three for each of the adoptive witnesses and birth witnesses.

You may observe that I've added Adoptive Birthparent as a role to cover the case when one birth parent ends up adopting their own child. I understand that this happens today because (in England & Wales at least) a child is adopted by a couple and so it's not possible for a birth parent to have their relationship carry on through the adoption. Typically this seems to happen when a couple split and one parent (say the mother) remarries; the step-father then wishes to demonstrate his commitment by adopting his step-child - the adoption has to be by a couple, so the adoption is by the step-father and the birth mother.

I'm sure that it would be possible to assign the same person with two roles of Adoptive Parent and Birth Parent and then create a sentence to satisfy but it wasn't immediately clear to me how to do that, so I created the Adoptive Birthparent role.

I left the Birth Parent in as a role because otherwise I probably wouldn't see anything in the narrative for the birth parents to signify that their child had later been adopted.

This is my sentence for the adoption event (NB - Notes for facts are set to appear in my narrative reports by default):

<para>{individual} was adopted <by {role=adoptive parent,adoptive birthparent}> {date} {place} {age}

The witness role sentences are then
Adoptive Parent
<para>{individual} <and {other:GIVEN=Adoptive Parent}> <and {other:GIVEN=Adoptive Birthparent}> adopted a {=Sex(%CUR_PRIN%,"son","daughter","child")}, {principal}, {date} {place}. {note}

Birth Parent
<para>{individual's} {=Sex(%CUR_PRIN%,"son","daughter","child")} {principal} was adopted <by {role=adoptive parent,adoptive birthparent}> {date} {place}. {note}

Adoptive Birthparent
<para>{individual} <and {other:GIVEN=Adoptive Parent}> <and {other:GIVEN=Adoptive Birthparent}> adopted {his/her} {=Sex(%CUR_PRIN%,"son","daughter","child")}, {principal}, {date} {place}. {note}

There was a little tweaking by me of the sentences to avoid the full names of the parents appearing in their own report, which seemed a bit much.