Add "Affair", "Natural" or something similar in Parent Relationships
Due to the popularity of DNA Tests, we are finding that there are many children of Non Married Partners (NPE) and are not biologically related to their Birth Certificate Fathers. Currently, the only option that I see is "living together"....that is not been the experience with the "Natural" children born in my family.
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I agree. Step is the best, but it is very misleading as what you describe is decades of thinking there is a biological relationship when there wasn't. Step is usually thought of as a "replacement" parent after a death or divorce.
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@amletnes aol.com We need to be clear on what kind of relationship we are talking about. There are two kinds of relationship in Family Tree: a couple relationship between two individuals, and a parent-child relationship between 3 people (two parents and one child, although one possibility is for one of the parents to be unknown).
The option you mentioned of "living together" is a type that applies only to a couple relationship; it makes no sense for a parent-child relationship. Are you trying to to define the couple relationship between two people who produced a child, but where those parents never lived together in any sort of actual couple relationship? If so, the best practice is for those two parents to not have any couple relationship at all. They would simply both be participants in a parent-child relationship with the child, where the relationship type for the child to each of these parents would be "Biological."
The reply of @Gail Swihart Watson seems to address a different question: what is the relationship between the child and the parent who may well have raised the child and been thought by most people to have been the biological parent, but who was shown by DNA to not be the biological parent. In that case, I would agree that "Step" is the best current choice. The option of "Affair" suggested in the title of the post seems completely misleading in this case, and "Natural" would not be much better -- both seem to imply a biological relationship where none exists.
The definition of stepparent I find most often is something like "a person who marries one's own parent after the death or divorce of the other parent and therefore has no biological relationship to the child." That sequence of the marriage happening after death or divorce doesn't apply in these cases, but the marriage to the other biological parent and the lack of biological relationship to the child does apply. I'm hard pressed to come up with a term that would be clearly understood to cover this situation, so I'm inclined to stick with "step."
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I like the idea that was suggested by another contributor here: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/507584. It was to add a parent type of Legal. Then the couple relationship can just be left as "No Marriage Events" and the child to parent relationship can be defined as it is under current law, at least in the US, which is that the legal father of a child is the man to whom the mother is married no matter who the biological father is. (If the mother is not married, it is who she declares the father to be, whether he is the biological father or not, if that man agrees to sign a paternity document.)
This would allow the following family structure (created on the beta site) which properly shows the difference between biological, legal, adoptive, and step fathers.
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