Persons with no relationship in records
Persons with no relationship in records
There are persons in some records that are not related, such as in a census record where a person in the household is a “boarder”. Under sources, details, the relationship to head of house is blank. It should say “no relation”, or “Boarder” (which is what is says in the original document).
In such cases there should not be a link to “UNFINISHED ATTACHMENTS”. If one clicks on “UNFINISHED ATTACHMENTS” it takes them to a page asking to attach the person to the family. To an inexperienced Family Searcher, this could result in adding unrelated persons to a family. More than once I have had to remove such unrelated persons (boarders) from a family.
You cannot fix this by trying to edit the record as there is not a “NO RELATION” option.
Comments
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Technically you are correct. However, the "unfinished attachments" always catches my eye and sometimes I will investigate. Usually, as you pointed out, there is no relationship that is valuable to family history, but occasionally there is. Now that we have the "other relationship" function, I have the option of joining 2 people that way when it is useful. VERY VERY rarely, I have actually found missing relatives. The 1930 census, in particular, is full of people down on their luck who had to move in with others. It has been a HUGE eye opener for me to see who moved in with whom.
So perhaps the "unfinished attachments" flag could be made to take up space, but I would like to still see it.
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If your investigation reveals that the unfinished attachment is someone unrelated that you have little or no hope of tracking down, you can dismiss the notice about it. This will prevent an inexperienced person from coming along and creating a relationship based on it.
Making the unfinished attachments notice dependent on the indexed relationships is an intriguing idea, but unfortunately, I think it would be more trouble than it's worth, not just because of deficient indexes: even if a person is marked as a "boarder", and is correctly indexed as such, it may turn out that he's actually, say, a nephew. Each case has to be looked at specifically and individually to make any sort of determination about relatedness.
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I have several instances in my personal research, on close family members, where the "boarder" was a sibling. Those "extra" people in the household can often break down research barriers, giving us married names for females. I certainly wouldn't want some automated algorithm (shiver) making a decision that I don't need to look at that record.
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I, too, sometimes come across a "Boarder" or "Visitor" who does turn out to be a relative - perhaps a daughter in her married name. As suggested, if you do establish they definitely have no relationship to the family in question, just dismiss the "Unfinished Attachment" notice.
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I have one unrelated boarder who later became a son-in-law. Whether he was boarding with them because he was going to become their son-in-law, or if he HAD to become their son-in-law because he was boarding there is open to debate.
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