Editing ';Non-Standard'; Family Info

mjc2002 · Post by **mjc2002** » 03 May 2004 06:29

Hello,

Had a fairly horrendous weekend with FH. 48 hours later and I've made no progress, so back to the experts!

I think my problem is as identified by Simon in one of his posts:

'Incidentally there is also the issue, as Jane hinted - what if A adopts the child of C and D? In that case, this child should be added to the family of A and C, and marked as adopted by A (but not by C). This child will appear to have 2 sets of parent families - A+C and C+D.'

Fine, Simon, but HOW?! Well, to be clear, here's my situation:

My Uncle remarried. His second (current) wife already had a daughter, who for me has always been a 'cousin'. In diagrams, however, she isn't appearing at all, so it occurred to me to make her an adopted daughter of my Uncle. How? Where?! Is this the correct idea? Would this solve my problem? I had a few attempts at doing it myself by adding my cousin as a child to my Uncle's family record, but the result was a mess. On this topic (sort of), how do you unlink relationships? Fortunately, I always back up my gedcom files, so I simply abandoned my endeavours and retrieved my back up file (48 hours later!), but it does *seem* awfully difficult to edit information for 'non-standard' families in FH. I'm sure it's just my inexperience, at least I hope it is.

I also had a few failed attempts at adding adoption as an event, but ended up getting my Uncle adopted (instead of my cousin!!)

Also, on this topic, where is the information about adoptions stored?

Thanks
Mike

ID:405

mjc2002 · Post by **mjc2002** » 03 May 2004 06:40

PS.

I have just tried (wrongly I daresay) adding my cousin as an adopted daughter of my uncle - first I created a link to my uncle's second family record and then used Add 'adopted father' relationship. I'm not sure if this is right or wrong, but the resulting diagram (using Descendants of my greatgrandfather) is a slight improvement - my cousin now appears as my uncle's daughter (whereas before she didn't appear at all). Of course, this information is not strictly correct because she is not his daughter. My cousin's real father doesn't show up on the diagram at all.

Curiously, however, if I ask for an all-relatives diagram for my cousin, I can only see information about her real father ie. her adopted father (my uncle) doesn't even appear on the diagram

Mike

vliet · Post by **vliet** » 03 May 2004 10:13

I've had a few similar problems this week-end too. I can link myself to my natural parents with no problem, obviously. And I can link myself with my adopted name to my adoptive parents. Trying to show myself as the same person but with two names seems to cause a problem.

Alias or Associated Person are the way into it but there doesn't appear to be a way to show 'both of me' in the same diagram, especially an 'all descendants' one. I think I've posted something along these lines before so, sorry if I'm repeating myselves!!!!

THEN - when I used one of the GEDCOM to HTML to make the webpages, I was shown as the wrong name to the wrong parents. This must be due to the order (I think) that my alias/associated person listing has been done in FH but I don't know.

Finally, a comment about upper case. When filling in surnames, I had always used upper case. I noticed that they always appeared in the individual records window and diagrams in upper whether I used it or not, so I stopped.
The HTML files I generated however picked up the differences and I had a ugly misture of upper & lower on the web pages.

Therefore - always use upper case; it will save hours in the end!

vliet. [grin]

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 04 May 2004 08:21

Personally I always use lower case. I have seem tools to set the data down to lower case, once done FH can show the name in upper case the setting is in the preferences.

With regard to the multiple parents and name quiestion.

FH can not currently show multiple parents on one chart, the first listed set of parents are used when centering on the person involved, to my knowledge when desending down to a person the relevent set is used.

The name field used is the first one listed in the person, if you want to show both simply add a line
%INDI.NAME[2]%
This will then show both names where they exist.

mjc2002 · Post by **mjc2002** » 04 May 2004 14:16

'The name field used is the first one listed in the person, if you want to show both simply add a line
%INDI.NAME[2]%
This will then show both names where they exist. '

Could you expand on this a little, please, Jane? Are you talking about diagrams? To my knowledge, you can't add *any* command lines to *diagrams* can you?? And if so where/how??

Thanks
Mike

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 04 May 2004 14:44

In diagrams options on the text tab, you can edit the Text Schemes. Simply select the box type you want to change and add the line. You may want to add the line to several of the box types, have a play. You can always press the installation settings button if you get in a mess.

mjc2002 · Post by **mjc2002** » 04 May 2004 14:58

Ah, yes, the text schemes. Thank you, Jane. Yes, I've successfully played around with a few of these.
Very nice tool. FH is quite beautifully crafted in many places, I feel. So, I'll see if adding an extra line in the text scheme has any effect.

I still get confused, however, because you're not actually changing the diagram itself, are you? It's a funny thing FH - a lovely program and I'm very very happy with it (I must post a positive review on Amazon one of these days), but I realise that, contrary to most software, the more I use it, the *more* confused I get! I hope this is just a temporary phase I'm going through while I sort out my concepts. I'm sure I'll be fine in a couple of months, but for the moment when I click on 'Accept', 'Apply' etc. I'm never 100% sure of exactly what I'm saving and, more to the point, of what I'm losing.

Mike

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