How are unmarried parents best represented in FamilyTree?
For Couple Relationship, the only options for Events are Annulment, Common Law Marriage, Divorce, Lived Together, and Marriage. The only option for Facts is No Children. What if the best way to describe the relationship is "had a child together" with no other known connection?
Answers
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One way is to show the couple with with the child but do not add any marriage event. The other way is to attach the child to each parent separately and mark the parent child relationship as Biological
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I've tried both. Either way seems to be documentation by implication.
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"Either way seems to be documentation by implication."
Exactly so @WildeLeonEllis . My 3G GPs have "No Marriage Events" with a pencil icon by that statement inviting me to add details of marriage events. I have instead put a note against their "relationship" saying
"Martha Beech and William Harding did not marry. The text for the baptisms of daughter Emily makes it clear that her parents were unmarried at the time of her baptisms. Any marriage would appear in the England & Wales Marriage Index - it doesn't. ...
"There is no evidence that they lived together - she was a servant girl at his father's farm in one census but that's all. They are apart in later censuses. "
Can I trust anyone to read the note? Err...
Any rigorous system design would allow me to make a positive statement through a data item saying "Did not live together; had a child". As it is, I depend on a note and the implication of there being no events.
As for attaching the child to each parent separately, I'm not blaming Chas because it's a suggestion that I've seen many times, but to my literal mind attaching separate parents means
- Someone thinks that they know who the father was,
- Someone else thinks they know who the mother is,
- But no one is convinced of who the two together are.
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1) What is the correct way to input unmarried parents in FamilySearch?
2) Can children be sealed to unmarried parents?
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For what it's worth, I concur with WildeLeonEllis thinking.
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Dear HCMJ:
I was unable to quickly find the Knowledge Article for your first question, but if the people are put in without a marriage date, it is recognized that the two people were not married. A note can be added on the right that says the were not married.
Here is the Knowledge Article that addresses your second question. Yes, children can be sealed to parents that were not married. They are considered common-law marriage. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/do-common-law-spouses-have-the-same-precedence-as-married-spouses. Please let us know if there are any other questions.
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The problem with not putting in a marriage date, is that it only means that there is no marriage date. That could be because nobody's got round to putting a marriage date in yet. Notes can be ignored and are therefore less than satisfactory - but it's probably the best anyone can do at the moment.
@PABulfinch - I'm not sure quite what you mean by "They are considered common-law marriage". The Church (I'm not a member) is perfectly entitled to seal whoever it decides, of course. It's the view outside that I'm concerned with.
I get twitchy over the topic of Common Law marriage because it's very misunderstood. Here in the UK, there is a major tendency for people to think that unmarried parents are common-law spouses - not so. The UK has never had Common Law marriage (and I got that statement from a professor of marriage law). Even in those jurisdictions that do have Common Law marriage, there are, so far as I can see, all sorts of conditions that have to be in place before a couple can be considered Common Law spouses.
So not all unmarried parents qualify to be considered as legal Common Law spouses.
It could be, of course, that your link explains all that, in which case I apologise for repeating the information but, not being a Church member, I can't see the link. As I said, it's the secular and legal angle that I'm concerned with because that plays a major role in determining how our relatives lived.
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I have an ancestor who fathered a child with someone he did not live with. His paternity is documented on the birth certificate and verified through DNA evidence. In FamilySearch, he and the child's mother were put into a couple relationship labeled "common law marriage" by the child herself, perhaps because there wasn't a closer option, but the two did not live together and did not present themselves as husband and wife, so the label is inaccurate. I went ahead and removed the couple relationship and left the child attached to each as biological father and biological mother, but the couple still appear together in FamilySearch, just with "no marriage events" which looks more like missing data than it does an established fact. Adding a "did not live together; had a child" couple relationship (or words to that effect) would be most helpful for situations like this.
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The problem is that the correct option is not available. The solution is to select the least wrong option. As demonstrated in the answers to this question, people have different views on this point and therefore there is inconsistency. Also someone with a different view to the currently selected option can come in and change it. I had this problem with my grandfather’s birth. I do not believe his parents had more than a casual relationship (however not certain of this). I chose one option and some time later changed my mind and selected the other option.
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I have this situation and the birth mom and birth dad married other people. This person in my family has 3 sets of parents: birth mom and her husband, birth dad and his wife and the adoptive parents. The only thing I dislike about this set up is having to establish a relationship between the "child" and the 2 step parents. I feel very strongly that there should be a relationship that is merely "spouse of father" or "spouse of mother", and that the "step" relationship should be reserved for those situation where the step was involved in the family of the step child. These "step" parents did not have any part in the life of my adopted family member, but if I don't add the 3 separate couples, birth mom and birth dad would show as a couple. They were never a couple. Another reason to show the birth parents with their spouses is for the lineage of all the half siblings. I have worked closely with the husband of one of the half sisters with my lineage research, and I have also spoken with birth mom about her family.
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As already suggested, whatever our personal preference(s) about how we show relationships, this will not always suit the wishes of others who are working on the same branches.
I was recently contacted by a Family Tree user requesting me to remove a "step" relationship I had added to his ancestor, as he was now receiving FamilySearch notifications about that branch, whereas he was only interested in hearing about his biological relatives. I would have preferred to see these step relationships remain, as they made clear the reasons for changes of surname later in life, etc. However, I complied as the family was not related to me in any way, so felt I should meet his wishes on the matter.
When I first started using Family Tree, I took the advice to show a child under each biological parent, but not to show these parents in a relationship if it appeared they had never been any "meaningful" relationship. However, I was then advised (by a senior manager) that it was fine to add such a (illegitimate) child under a linked parentage, rather than keep the parents separated. Since then, advice has changed from one option to the other, so - without checking - I'm unsure whether I have applied a consistent practice, or if I have added illegitimate children according to how it seemed preferable at the time!
In summary, whilst there seem no fixed directions on the subject, the "meaningful relationship" situation (e.g., not to show the biological parents in a relationship with each other if the child appears to have been born as a result of a "one night stand", say) seems to be the one most commonly followed by Family Tree users. The majority of responses I have encountered over the years appear to share a preference of only adding a child to a couple if there is some evidence they at least lived together - for however short a period - an actual "marriage" being of no relevance to the situation whatsoever.
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I would just add that I make the above comments as someone who is not a member of the LDS Church. With regards to using names / relationships for ordinances, etc., I believe the issue of how to connect individuals in Family Tree could well involve a different perspective by members of the Church from mine.
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@Paul W said:
I was then advised (by a senior manager) that it was fine to add such a (illegitimate) child under a linked parentage, rather than keep the parents separated. Since then, advice has changed from one option to the other, so - without checking - I'm unsure whether I have applied a consistent practice, or if I have added illegitimate children according to how it seemed preferable at the time!
I'm glad it's not just me who's slightly confused over what best practice should be in FS Family Tree.
I remain convinced that FamilySearch and the non-LDS genealogical community can work together in a win/win scenario.
However, the topic of how to represent the relationship between the biological parents of a child (and the child) in cases where there is no ongoing domestic relationship, is, I feel, one where we are liable to differ. My personal feeling is that we are being driven by a desire on the part of FS (or is it the LDS Church?) to only record relationships in FS FT that would qualify for ordinances behind the scenes. For instance, my 3G GPs, William & Martha, never lived together but I have clear evidence from 2 baptisms that they are the biological parents of my GG-GM. My impression is that FS would rather I did not create a relationship between William and Martha. However:
- I'm not sure if that personal impression is correct or whether there even is a single "correct" view from FS on how they should be recorded in FS FT;
- While there may never have been an ongoing domestic relationship between William & Martha, there was certainly a sexual relationship for which their daughter and the parish registers provide the evidence;
- Best practice in IT is that I don't just leave something empty - because the reason for that is that I might have forgotten to enter anything. I should enter a positive statement, even if that positive statement is "We don't know...". This means that I should be able to enter something about William & Martha's relationship, not leave certain items empty, etc. nor have William in one family as a father of the daughter separate from Martha in another family as a mother of her daughter. That omits information;
- If FS wants to suppress that relationship from going forward in some ordinances, it's absolutely fine by me if a Church member marks William & Martha's relationship behind the scenes as not qualifying for those ordinances. But it shouldn't be up to me to second guess what sort of relationship (if any) I should be entering;
- As an aside, personal attributes such as "Never married" don't work in this case because both William and Martha went on to marry other people and have children with those others;
- Any advice on this topic needs to be on-screen, not in some background video. Goodness knows we all of us have enough examples in our families to make it worthwhile.
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On other genealogy sites, I find it ...annoying that relationships involving different marriages are automatically labeled "step" -- for example, a deceased first spouse is automatically the stepparent of children from a later marriage. Um, hello, he was dead, they never met him....
On FS, it's the other extreme that can get annoying: half-siblings are invisible on a profile's details page unless a step relationship is entered with the half-sibling's other parent. I currently have my illegitimate great-grandmother entered with just a single child-parent relationship, with her mother; I have absolutely no information about her father's identity, and have resigned myself to never having any. (People in that area of the world don't really do DNA.) When she was ten years old, her mother got married, but I have to go to said mother's profile to see that relationship, or the daughter that resulted from it. From my great-grandmother's page, there's no sign that she had a half-sister. However, I'm reluctant to add the step-relationship, because as far as I can tell, my great-grandmother was already working as a housemaid at that point, i.e., she never shared a roof with the man. If FS had a "spouse of parent" option -- or heck, if it honored any of the relationship types we enter, instead of treating all of them as equivalent to biological -- then I wouldn't hesitate to enter the relationship, so that the half-sibling would be visible, but as it is, I'm leaving it unentered. (It'd be different if there were more than just the one half-sister, I think.)
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When I view the tree, I want to see both of the bio parents of a person, whether it was a once-only relationship or something else. If there is no marriage "fact" to be entered, then no entry of a fact is needed. Sure, you can enter a note about it so that others don't keep searching for a marriage, but trying to guess at whether someone had a "meaningful relationship" or even whether they lived together, is wrong. How about if we just document facts as facts, without the judgment of "legitimacy"? It is not "missing data" for unmarried, noncohabitating parents to produce children, no matter how one personally feels about that.
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Annette Morgan Nobody is disagreeing with what you say, but you seem to imply that the bio parents should always be viewed as a couple. Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth and if so, I'm sorry, but if this is what you meant, then no. Bio parents shouldn't necessarily be shown as a couple.
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"Bio parents shouldn't necessarily be shown as a couple."
I disagree, I think when they are not shown as a couple, when viewing one parent's profile, it looks like you don't know who the other parent was and this is misleading. If you know who both bio parents are, they should appear on each other's profile. They did have a relationship, after all - even if it was only physical and only once, that is still a physical coupling. FS have added all these "other" relationships now - you can add people who aren't even related like employers, apprentices, neighbors, etc. and I think that's useful. But all those "other" relationships, and yet we still don't have a good way to acknowledge when two people had a physical relationship that didn't involve marriage?
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One option for an illegitimate child has not yet been mentioned, which in many cases I think is the best of all: have a parent-child relationship between the child and the biological parents, but remove the couple relationship between those two co-parents. This approach shows that there is indeed no relationship between those two people as a couple, but that they are both parents of that child.
I really don't like the approach that some people advocate for having two sets of parent-child relationships for the illegitimate child (one with just the mother and a missing father, and the other with just the father and a missing mother). With that approach, any trees drawn with that child will have half of the child's ancestry missing. Using the approach I suggested will show the complete ancestry.
Of course, an illegitimate child may well have adoptive parents, in which case those parents should definitely be included as an additional set of parents. Step-parents could also be an additional set of parents, but I am with those people who say that step-parents should only be added when there was a meaningful relationship between the child and those step-parents. If there are multiple sets of parents, then each user can choose which are the preferred set of parents for drawing trees.
One additional note for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: The approach I mentioned above will prevent the couple from being sealed, which is in line with the policy regarding parents who never lived together in any kind of couple relationship.
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"Bio parents shouldn't necessarily be shown as a couple."
But this is my problem, @Gail Swihart Watson. I believe that they should be shown as some sort of couple. There are 2 reasons for this.
Firstly if they are shown separately, that could be taken to mean that one person believes X is the biological father while someone else entirely, thinks that Y is the biological mother, with no guarantee that both statements are true.
Secondly, saying that they are potentially not a couple demands a specific meaning of the word "couple", and we haven't been given that meaning. To me, a couple is simply 2 people who we want to record something about - in this case, that they had a child but didn't live together. My guess would be that your definition would tend towards a couple being 2 people who lived together with some sort of ongoing commitment. Apologies for putting words into your mouth, especially if I'm getting it wrong. But this is one of the issues - we have no clear statement from FS about what "couple" means - nor "spousal relationship" as I've seen it described. Not merely that but my personal suspicion is that the actual definition would start with the words "It depends..." (My definition for anything other than just "2 people of interest" would definitely start with "It depends..."!)
If there is a specific FS definition other than "Just any 2 people of interest" then I would like that definition to be on the other side of the LDS/non LDS so it doesn't need me, as I said, to second guess what I should be entering. If FS want me to record values for separate markers like "Lived together or not", "Ongoing relationship outside a domestic setting or not", "One off encounter" that would be fine by me. (Those values are not intended to be anything other than prompts).
In summary, a couple, for me, is simply any male/female couple who we want to say anything about - whether that's having a child, living together, not living together - even recording "There is no evidence that they even met!" If FS wants a different definition, it needs to answer the questions that it hasn't.
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It sounds like you haven't seen a profile of an adopted child. ALL six parents show up and all siblings show up under the appropriate parents whether they are adopted siblings, half siblings of birth mom and her husband or half siblings of birth dad and his wife. EVERY relationship not biological to the adopted is visibly defined as "step" or "adoptive" and quite readable. You can see all parents at a glance. So no, displaying birth mom and birth dad as a couple leaves out most of the family.
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Julia Szent-Györgyi. You once had a graphic showing an adopted child with 6 parents that you did up in the sand box. Do you still have it and if so can you post it? My real situation is not good to screen shot because many people are still alive. I'd have to edit out almost everything...
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@Alan E. Brown suggested
"have a parent-child relationship between the child and the biological parents, but remove the couple relationship between those two co-parents."
I think that is a good suggestion - when I tried it, however (and this was some time ago) , it left prompts all over the place suggesting that I enter what I'd just removed! And there was nowhere for me to write my logic why I knew that they never married, other than to repeat it on both profiles.
So I'd prefer some tweaks to overcome those aspects.
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You say:
One option for an illegitimate child has not yet been mentioned, which in many cases I think is the best of all: have a parent-child relationship between the child and the biological parents, but remove the couple relationship between those two co-parents.
The problem again (as Adrian suggests in his comments) lies in the lack of clarity FamilySearch gives to the whole issue. Take the examples below. To be honest, I only just realised that the "No Marriage Events" in the first example appears to be the "default" note under the names when a marriage has not been added, but to see "ADD COUPLE RELATIONSHIP" (second example) one has to first remove the couple relationship, like this:
The meaning of the wording in these cases was certainly too subtle (if that's the word) for me to differentiate in what / if any relationship existed. Perhaps the ordinance process automatically rejects a sealing on the basis of the second wording, but how would those who do not belong to the Church have any clue about this being such a relevant factor (to those within the LDS Church)?
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@Paul W - if FS worked on the basis that "No marriage events" means "Not married nor engaged nor..." that would be a way forward, but I think that possibility sailed long ago, perhaps in the days of the production of what became the IGI. Maybe?
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@Adrian Bruce1 said:
I think that is a good suggestion - when I tried it, however (and this was some time ago) , it left prompts all over the place suggesting that I enter what I'd just removed! And there was nowhere for me to write my logic why I knew that they never married, other than to repeat it on both profiles.
I know that in this situation there is a button that says "Add Couple Relationship" but I don't see how that is suggesting that you should do that, any more than the presence of an "Add Spouse" or "Add Child" button that you see all the time is suggesting that you should add a spouse or child to a person. If I recall correctly, long ago there was a data problem shown when two people had a child but had no couple relationship, but that has not been the case for several years. Perhaps that is what you are remembering.
I do agree that it is a shortcoming that the only reasonable way to explain the reason for the lack of of a couple relationship is to add a note to each of the parents. But it's only a mild shortcoming -- in my experience, notes attached to a couple relationship are sufficiently buried that hardly anyone sees them or acts on them, whereas notes on an individual are much more prominent and thus have a better chance of being seen and given their proper consideration.
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I tried to figure out how sandbox works, but failed. So, I created fake live people in the real environment to show how much information you can have from viewing all the 6 parents and siblings. Hopefully one can see that this is from the profile or person page of the adopted child whose parents never married each other, but in fact married others. Thus, this adopted child has adoptive siblings, paternal half siblings and maternal half siblings. I think this tells the best possible story of the adopted child's family and is the correct way to show the relationships. The only thing I don't like is the step, but that's ok for now.
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@Paul W said:
The meaning of the wording in these cases was certainly too subtle (if that's the word) for me to differentiate in what / if any relationship existed. Perhaps the ordinance process automatically rejects a sealing on the basis of the second wording, but how would those who do not belong to the Church have any clue about this being such a relevant factor (to those within the LDS Church)?
Those who do not belong to the Church would indeed have no way to know that this is a relevant factor to Church members. No one expects them to take this into account. My side note was addressed to Church members. But that was only a side note. The point of my comment was that I think that having no couple relationship between the parents of an illegitimate child (who had no other relationship) is the best choice. That statement is true even without any consideration of issues unique to Church members.
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@Alan E. Brown said
"I know that in this situation there is a button that says "Add Couple Relationship" but I don't see how that is suggesting that you should do that, ..."
Well, we may have to disagree on the likelihood of people doing just that. After all, nothing says that hints should be accepted - but it often feels like people do (or did) exactly that.
"I do agree that it is a shortcoming that the only reasonable way to explain the reason for the lack of of a couple relationship is to add a note to each of the parents. But it's only a mild shortcoming -- in my experience, notes attached to a couple relationship are sufficiently buried that hardly anyone sees them or acts on them, whereas notes on an individual are much more prominent and thus have a better chance of being seen and given their proper consideration."
Hmm - probably fair comment about which position of Note is more visible.
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I don't think I really responded to your post. Apologies! So, your first concern, people will get mixed up on who is bio parent vs another type. If you would look at my screen shot above, assuming everyone can see it, is it unclear who is what type of parent to the Adopted Child Test? I don't think so.
Your second concern revolves around the definition of couple. Yes, I think it has been established that we are all over the place, so I won't beat that dead horse. I will, however, point out that there are 3 kinds of siblings for the Adopted Child in my screen shot above (which also holds true for my adopted relative's real situation): maternal half sibling, paternal half sibling and adoptive sibling. You can see the larger family of Adopted Child by grouping the parents according to marriage much better than "pretending" bio mom and dad were a couple and leaving everyone else out of the picture. I believe that is more important. (Yes, I didn't put fake marriage dates in my fake data, but please pretend I did because, again, that is the real situation.). You can clearly see 2 separate things in the way I have the family set up: who the married couples are in Adopted Child's life and who Adopted Child's biological parents are. We can see clearly Adopted Child's parents never married each other.
So I am not going to try and interject myself into the FS dilemma of LDS problems, I just want to paint the most accurate picture possible of my adopted relative's family. ALL of the family. I know that some of the half siblings are in FamilySearch and working on the tree so it is important for me to keep them in mind. Of all the 6 parents, only one yet lives, but of all the children, adopted and half, all are alive. So I believe this family grouping will work in the years to come for people to understand the relationships. Making the picture just one couple, who never lived together or married, leaves out so much of the picture.
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@Gail Swihart Watson said
"... the definition of couple. Yes, I think it has been established that we are all over the place, so I won't beat that dead horse ..."
Oh good, I'm glad we agree on that!
As for your diagram of your complex families - I would say that you've done a good job there, and adding in the biological pairing probably wouldn't add anything to the clarity.
"... Making the picture just one couple, who never lived together or married, leaves out so much of the picture. ... "
Totally agree - although I never envisaged making the picture just that one couple. What's useful, I think, in that diagram is the insertion of "step" against the child-to-parent relationship. I'm not sure I realised that it would appear on the diagram. Of course, me being me, I had to see what happened when I set the relationship type to "biological". Well, it appears on the Parent-Child Relationship window (the one that gives the detail about that relationship) but (unlike "step") it doesn't appear on the Family Members diagram for the Profile. Sigh...
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