* Ancestor (Male or Female) remarries and has additional Children

[David Potter]

Hi Guru's

I have a number of individuals in my direct ancestor line that lost their spouse (the other ancestor of mine). And then remarried and had further children with the new spouse.

I'm questioning should I keep the children from these other marriages to a spouse not in my ancestor line. I would keep the marriage of course, but would like to have your thoughts on those children. I appreciate it is research and useful to a degree as general family history. But are they not 'collateral' to use a term?

Many thanks.

[AdrianBruce]

Entirely up to you what you include in your file. But for me, having half-siblings in my tree is a definite yes. Consider the lives of your ancestors... They presumably knew (or in some circumstances, knew of) these half-siblings, so they were part of their life story. If I have a census, say, with a family in, then all the that family goes into my file. And yes, that includes any step-siblings that the second spouse brings to the party.

Remember siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings can provide an alternative track to follow if we lose the thread of our direct ancestors.

There's no particular desire on my part to go further with step or half siblings when they leave the family home - or indeed, with full siblings either. I have to draw the line somewhere and my initial line is drawn around households with my ancestors in. However, I reserve the right to follow other siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings if they seem to have an interesting story to tell!

[ColeValleyGirl]

The answer, as always, is 'it depends'. If you use the FAN principle (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/conte ... -principle) in your research, then it's always useful to record the people associated in some way with the ancestors in whom you're interested.

For example, I had a female ancestor who remarried and had children under a second surname. When trying to track down one of her grandchildren in the census (with a very common name) it was invaluable to be able to clinch an identification of Tom Jones (the nephew of Ellen Peabody) because I knew that Tom's grandmother had married a Peabody and had a child called Ellen...

[tatewise]

Yes, it is an entirely personal choice.
It is not unknown for such 'indirect' ancestors (or their descendants) to have relationships with other 'direct' ancestors.
As Adrian suggests, they are all in the 'family' at that time, and known to each other, so anything is possible.

There was related discussion in How wide to go? (Cousins) (14756).

[LornaCraig]

I always record half-siblings because they are genetically related, having one ancestor in common with me. For the same reason I record their descendants when I find them. I don't draw any line between full and half siblings. Step-siblings are not genetically related (unless there happened to be a common ancestor or a later marriage between descendants) so although I usually record them I don't follow their descendants lines.

[David Potter]

Thank you all so much for those valuable contributions. That really helped me along.

I will follow up with those links provided. Really pleased I asked the question now.

Many thanks.

[David Potter]

Hi All

These additional Spouse and Step Children exist in a separate FH Project than the one I consider to the be the Master Project.

Is there a clean, reliable and simple way of importing these families and those additional Children into my Master Project?

Many thanks

[tatewise]

This is moving away from Research and into FH General Usage. So if it gets involved the thread may need splitting.

Essentially use how_to:exporting_gedcom_with_multimedia|> Exporting a Family Tree with/without Media to export a subset Gedcom from your 'separate' Project, and then use File > Merge/Compare File to import it into your Master Project, merging the parent Individual and Family and other records as necessary.

How simple that process turns out to be, depends on how different the parent details are in the two Projects.
It is this kind of scenario that leads us to advise that one large Project is usually better than several.

[David Potter]

Thank you Mike

Okay I'll own up. I saved what was the Master tree including the children to another Project to preserve the data. Then I removed the children from the new Master tree BEFORE asking you guys should I leave them in.

So now need to undo removing those Children.

More Haste, Less Speed

[tatewise]

Ah, glad you owned up, as there is a simpler solution, especially if no Media are involved.

Use File > Backup/Restore > Revert to Snapshot and revert to the Gedcom just before you removed the children.

This however relies on no other new data having been added in the meantime as that will get removed.

If Media were involved then the old Media records will be restored, and the Media files may even still exist.
If not then those files need to be copied from Project to Project.

[David Potter]

Hi Mike

Thanks again for trying to help me out. Unfortunately a lot of updates have occurred since that removal of children - so I'll have to go through the merge. Will back up of course before hand.