Adding "No Children" as a marriage "Fact" should cause "Add Child" to disappear from Details page
Hi FamilySearchers!
Currently am working on profile, L4XP-NNF, a lady who was married three times. Her last marriage occurred when she was somewhere between 72 to 77 years old - well past menopause, hence the "No Children" flag being added to the Fact section of the "Couple relationship" window.
However, once applied and back on the "Details" page of the profile, the couple still has the notation "Children (0), + ADD CHILD" appearing.
Could I suggest that "Children (0), + ADD CHILD" be replaced with the notation "No Children" when that fact is added, please? This will prevent someone carelessly adding a child to a relationship so flagged, and will force a consideration of source evidence: you would have to deliberately remove the "No Children" flag in order to get the "+ADD CHILD" option back again.
Best regards all!
Comments
-
It's probably not as simple as it seems. There are a ton of ways to attach children:
- Adding the parents from the child's profile.
- Adding a child during the process of linking a source.
- Adding the person as the missing parent in an existing family.
- Merging the profile with one that already has child attached.
If such functionality were to be added:
- Should it block people from attaching step-children or guardianships? (Currently these still trigger the conflict alert if No Children is set, which seems questionable to me.)
- Should the ability to add the fact be blocked if the person already has a child attached?
Also, there's actually two different places to add the No Children fact: to the couple in Relationships or to an individual in Other Information. If it's attached to one individual, and a child is attached to the couple from the spouse's profile, the alert about the conflict is not shown on the spouse's profile. Since hiding the Add button would likely piggyback off the existing Alert message logic, it's unlikely the Add button would be hidden on the spouse's profile in that situation.
1 -
The general philosophy of Family Tree is to point out inconsistencies, but not to disallow changes. For example, if you want to add a child born 5 years after the father died, should that be prohibited? Initially, someone might say Yes, but that is only reasonable if the death date is reliable, or the birth year of the child. If the father really died 6 years later, or the child was born 6 years earlier, then adding the child could be the correct thing to do, but a vital detail needs to be adjusted.
Similarly, for the case in the original post, the "No Children" fact might be incorrect, and whoever is adding a child might be correct. Family Tree will provide warnings along the way, and show a data problem if a child exists along with the "No Children" fact. That philosophy allows for guardrails without giving too much weight to one particular user-contributed conclusion over other conclusions.
And to clarify the meaning of the "No Children" fact: it was never intended to apply only to biological children. It applies to children of any type, including step, foster, and guardianship, which can all happen late in life, so we shouldn't assume that a person of a certain age can't be a parent.
2 -
Hmm all those ways to add a child.. I can see it would be a world of programmatic pain to investigate and troubleshoot all the potential permutations in advance. Never mind!
0