Using "Spouse" Incorrectly for Unmarried Biological Parents

LoisHertz

My father had a child out of wedlock. The birth mother is known and if I add the birth mother of the child on my father's detail page, then on the timeline page, the birth mother appears as a deceased spouse, which is incorrect as she was never a spouse! They were never married, nor did they cohabit with one another--they never had any relationship together as a couple beyond conceiving a child, and, in fact, I do not believe that my father ever knew anything about the pregnancy or the birth of the child. A spouse is defined as "a significant other in a marriage, civil union,or common-law marriage." In the case of my father and the woman he impregnated, they are simply biological parents of the child who was born.

Or, if you instead add the biological child to each of the birth parents detail pages, it will still show the birth mother and birth father on each page as an unknown spouse. This, too, is of course incorrect. They were never spouses. There needs to be a way to list a biological mother and father whose identities are known but who were never married, who did not have a common law relationship and were thus never spouses--who never had any kind of relationship legal or non-legal except for a sexual relationship, who were never a "couple" as defined by society. Why can't the biological parents be listed simply as biological father or birth father, or as biological mother or birth mother without automatically labeling them as having been connected as "spouses"? This is so wrong; it is a huge flaw in the software program, which I find offensive, and which I hope the engineers will correct as soon as they can.

Paul W

@LoisHertz

This problem has been highlighted many times over the years, but is part of the major overall issue FamilySearch seems unable to satisfactorily address: Couple Relationships.

There have been some excellent enhancements as a result of the work of Family Tree developers, so hopefully, this area will be worked on, some day. It involves (as you say) unsatisfactory terminology, but also the inability to openly see reason statements for ones inputs, or even to select an event - say religious or civil, if there has been a marriage - from a pick-list.

I accept it is a difficult part of Family Tree for the developers to deal with, as so many customs and practices worldwide come into play, whereas the majority of users probably work in terms of behaviours of their relatives who lived in the "western world".

However, be careful what you wish for! Once something new is introduced there are usually many "dissatisfied customers" and howls of protest that things should have been left as they were.

Michael W Benning

Perhaps the information in this article will explain how you can display the situation you describe.

“How do I indicate that a person in Family Tree had no children or was never in a relationship?”  https://www.familysearch.org/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-indicate-that-a-person-in-family-tree-had-no-children-or-was-never-in-a-relationship

Chas Howell

@Michael W Benning ,the suggested "No Couple Relationships. Click this option if the person never married or was never in a couple relationship." choice does not seem to apply to the OP. He did have a couple relationship with his spouse, just not to the biological mother.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

There is a way to avoid this: don't add the bio mother on your father's page. Only add her as a parent -- unconnected to any spouse -- on the child's page.

For example, here's a mockup in the sandbox (beta.familysearch.org) of what I could do for my illegitimate ancestor if I invented a father named Ismeretlen Atya ("Unknown Father") for her:

I added a death date of 1915 to Mr. Unknown and checked the mother's timeline; there's no sign of him:

Yes, this means that there is no direct way to get from Mommy to Daddy -- you have to go to the child's page to see both parents -- but it gets rid of all chances for FS to show a relationship where there wasn't one.