Unwed
I have recorded the father, now I want to record the mother of the children, The father and mother are not married.
Answers
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You can create the mother's profile and then add the child to the mother. This will create two separate parent-child relationships for the child. One will have only the father and one will have only the mother.
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Forgive me, but I have to disagree with this approach @AnneLoForteWillson. Creating separate parent-child relationships both complicates viewing the relationships in tree view (having to jump between viewing mother and father's ancestral lines), and opens the door for errors and mistakes down the track - with well meaning contributors potentially adding incorrect spouse/parent relationships in the unfilled positions.
@John53820 even if the parents weren't married, I suggest you still add the mother via the "+ ADD SPOUSE" option in relation to the father. See:
The term "spouse" here is a bit misleading as the couple do not have to have been married to be able to add this relationship. As you mention "children" not "child" I'm inferring that the couple were in some form of a relationship for a space of time.
After you have added the mother in this manner you will see a pencil icon next to where it says "No marriage events" beneath the couple.
You can just leave it blank or you can click the pencil icon to open the "Couple Relationship" pop up. Click on +ADD EVENT which will bring up a form to fill out marriage details. Click on the drop down menu where it says marriage and you will find options for "Lived Together" and "Common Law Marriage" like so:
If either of those apply you can save one of those options without having to add dates and locations (if you don't know them), to signal the couple weren't officially married.
Alternatively, you can also make a relationship note stating they weren't wed, which can also be helpful in the case of illegitimate births where no relationship applies. You can similarly add such a note under the +ADD REASON button, which may be more immediately visible. Vis:
Ideally there would be an "Unwed" option under the Facts category but unfortunately that doesn't exist at this point.
In the event the children all have the mother's surname, and not the father's, this is also usually a good indicator of an absence of marriage.
Hope that helps.
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For what it's worth (and FamilySearch is not good at recommending an approach to transient, unmarried parents), I agree with @RaniM's approach. The point about well meaning people adding incorrect spouses is well made. My GG-GM Beech was illegitimate - her parents are documented on her baptism (both baptisms!) but the relationship seems to have been transient - she was the maid, he was the son of the household but I really wouldn't care to say who made the running given that she had several more illegitimate children with an unknown father(s) before eventually marrying yet another guy.
I would far rather make that first relationship explicit because it's there, written out in the source, and if I don't, there's a risk that someone will bundle the first and subsequent children together. Of course, there's still that risk but somehow having a name on the first father makes it seem a bit more solid. And in any case, there was a relationship, however transient, between the two parents, which the alternative representation simply fails to show.
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The Family Tree program is not always too great at dealing with certain situations. Another example is in it still offering the opportunity to add children to an individual who died in infancy, even if a death date has been added, as well as No Children and No Couple Relationships "Facts"!
In this case, one cannot take the chosen FamilySearch / Family Tree term "Spouse" too literally - perhaps "Partner" would be a better term - because the latter term does not necessarily mean the parents did not marry, so can be used for both married and unmarried parents.
The question of how to "position" children whose parents never married has been one of discussion for many years on this and predecessor forums. The main suggestion has been that it is fine to position the child under both parents if it appears they had any form of relationship - even, perhaps, if they had other relationships / marriages at the same period. Where the suggestion of @AnneLoForteWillson has been put forward (by Family Tree managers, etc.) in the past, is when it appears there is no evidence of there ever having been a "meaningful relationship" between the known, biological parents (e.g., a "one night stand"). Seemingly, it has not been considered to be "appropriate" to connect biological parents to the child as "a couple", in such circumstances. (Not being a Church member, I'm not sure if Ordinances are a factor here.)
In short, evidence (or lack of such) of a formal marriage between the parents is not a factor that should be under consideration in these cases.
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The practice in these situations of adding two sets of parents, with one including the father and an unknown mother, and the other including the mother and an unknown father, is never a good idea. It's factually incorrect, since the father and mother are known. And it has the negative effects on the display of trees that @RaniM helpfully explained.
We need to be clear on the distinction between parent-child relationships and couple relationships. Although there is some interplay between those two kinds of relationships, they are very much distinct.
- The parent-child relationship should describe as accurately as possible the connection between the child and one or two parents. The only time there should be a connection between a child and only one parent is when the other parent is unknown. If both parents are known, then the child should be connected to both father and mother in a single parent-child relationship.
- The couple relationship should describe the relationship between the father and mother, independent of any children. There is no requirement for the couple to be married, as is clear from the relationship events that certainly don't imply marriage (Lived Together and Common-Law Marriage). If the couple never lived together at all (e.g., a child was produced by a one-night stand), then it may even be appropriate to delete the couple relationship entirely (without getting into the details, I would note that this can be particularly helpful when the possibility of temple ordinances is a factor). I wish there were better support for this situation in Family Tree that allowed us to document that there was really no relationship at all between the father and mother.
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Besides, the term "Partner" in today's language could imply **** relationships or as is more common that the two parties/parents were in a business relationship.
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