A faster way to see the civil status of a person
It may be a great idea to be able to see in the tree, without browing the profile page, the civil status of a person. We see when an ancestor is married but often times in the death certificate says ‘single’ and in the tree you see only that person and place to add a spouse. If we know that there is no spouse it would be helpful to eliminate that ‘add spouse’ place.
Does it make any sense?
thank you!
Beatriz Mendiondo
Comments
-
Yes, your comment / suggestion makes complete sense, but it is one that has been raised here time and time again. The most common reason for it being requested is for the profiles of children who died young, so could not possibly have had a spouse. Other than that, a good reason for not having a piece of coding added that would make the "Add Spouse" suggestion disappear is that (as you illustrate) it is not always 100% clear as to whether an individual did or did not marry / have any couple relationship.
There is a drop-down in the Other Information / Facts section whereby you can highlight conclusions like "No couple relationships" (or "No children"). However, I guess the engineers must have considered the extra piece of coding required to make that "Add Spouse" disappear (under certain given circumstances) would be of limited benefit and, in some cases, would be counterproductive (i.e., would discourage a search for an "elusive" relationship, which transpired did exist).
Yes, this does look odd - how could there be an "instruction" here to "Add Spouse" when the person died as an infant? Perhaps the programming is a factor here - too complicated to make exceptions with the "layout" so the box size is appropriately reduced in certain "definite" never-had-a-spouse instances:
0 -
The general philosophy of Family Tree is to allow conflicting details but then to show data warnings about the conflicts. After all, you don't know which conflicting detail is wrong. Using the scenario of this discussion, Family Tree will allow a person who died at age 1 to also have a spouse. Obviously something is wrong, but which detail is wrong? Does the person truly have a spouse, but didn't really die at age 1? Or did they die at age 1 but didn't actually have a spouse? I've seen both possibilities, so I can't be certain without further research which is the truth. The same is true of many of the other data warnings -- it's not obvious which of the conflicting details is wrong.
The new tree views do eliminate the Add Spouse option in the tree view if the No Couple Relationships fact is present. That seems more dependable than some arbitrary cutoff for death age. Sure, it's highly unlikely that a one-year old was ever married (although given all the different cultures over millennia, I wouldn't say it's impossible), but what about at age 8? age 10? age 12? It's much better to stick with the data warning approach, and also allow people to add the specific No Couple Relationships with its reason statement and sources to back it up and then rely on that.
1 -
I think the "Add Spouse" button is only tangentially related to this question. I think what the OP would like is for the profile summary (the card in older parts of the interface, or the sidebar in newer parts) to include spouses, or at least for it to indicate their existence.
0 -
Maybe Julia, but Beatriz does clearly state: "If we know that there is no spouse it would be helpful to eliminate that ‘add spouse’ place."
0 -
Thank you everyone for your inputs.
My suggestion is based on the idea of not having to go to the profile page to see if someone took the time to add a note that the person died single and/or had no children. Just to look at the tree if you see only one square with one name and you immediately know that that person was single and with no known relationships.
Anyway, thank you again!
0