Other Relationship types - Request for ideas

LegacyUser

joe martel said: We have had many posts about missing relationship types. I'll try to review them but if you have a summary of what has been discussed and what you prefer I'd love to hear it.

This discussion is not limited to just the spousal and parent-child relationship information but could be a relationship type between any 2 PIDs (or maybe more). So some that come to mind might be: twin, household/boarder, grandparent...(skipping missing generation), honored ancestor (Asian), friend, neighbor, apprentice/master, servant...,

Consider historical records and practices and which you believe are most critical to support capturing and showing in FamilyTree.

LegacyUser

Jessie Hearle said: Grandparent relationship type would be very helpful.
I have several family records which identify grandchildren by name, but do not identify the parent of the grandchild.

I would most certainly also use Twin, Servant, Apprentice, & Neighbor if available.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: I've had cases were "Sibling" would have been a nice option. The parents were unknown and I had to add a junk parent just to show the relationship.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

We have had many posts about missing relationship types

I hope that this is not based on all of the people who have been incorrectly assuming that things like "Marriage", "Common-Law", or "Lived together" are Relationship types. The way the system is set up, these are only the kinds of events that can occur specifically in a "Couple Relationship".

As far as I can tell, the system already uses (but does not fully support) all essential genealogical and family oriented relationships. That is the Parent-Child and Couple type relationships. Siblings and all other relatives are handled through these two relationship types. (e.g., twins are just siblings that might need some annotation to mitigate them from being incorrectly merged--no new relationship type is needed)

And respectfully, FS does not seem to be able to figure out how to make even these two basic and critical relationships work effectively. For support of basic sources, notes, with good visibility, and without having to create redundant clones of existing citations with altered titles, so far FS has failed. A lot of that has been broken for a long time now.

Joe, I know that you are just looking for ideas here, but I sincerely hope that FS is NOT considering even more complex relationship types allowing you to create non-genealogical or family type relationships between any two people in the FamilyTree. All this will do is dilute the proper usage of the two essential relationship types that we already have, but don't work well at all. It's like the dilution of the effective use of notes that has occurred in the FSFT.

So please, fix the existing Couple and parent-child relationships FIRST. Make them so that they are robust, intuitive, and get rid of the redundant sources the way it has been implemented. Allow tagging of sources from both individuals involved in the relationship. Allow tagging of notes. It should not be necessary to have to maintain a separate source and notes list for every, single, relationship in the system--especially when each is handled in a totally different way in the user interface.

Please! Please! Please! Get the basic, critical relationships working appropriately BEFORE adding any other non-essential "bells and whistles" type relationships to the system.

Regarding your original request, I can't think of any other relationship type that would be truly useful and wouldn't just add additional clutter, entropy, and confusion to the system.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: One great benefit of having other relationship types would be the increased ability for record matching.

As human researchers we gather and understand all this context about a family and their life. Can we expect a computer to make these same matches without this same context? Think how many brickwalls the hinting system could help people overcome if it had more context.

LegacyUser

Paul said: In a similar manner to Jeff, I too, would have reservations regarding how this would work when it came to any required programming. For example, current identification of possible duplicates does not work too well.

Also, as discussed in another thread, I think it best the engineers clear up the current problems first (recent - as with the new change log feature and merge procedure - and long-standing ones) before they start working on any new features.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Echoing Jeff and Paul (is that enough for "joining the chorus"?), I think it's much, much more important to get the existing two relationship types properly integrated with the rest of the tree, so that source citations are in the same place as all of the other source citations, the details are visible the same way as they are for other conclusions, and adding/removing/changing relationships is intuitive and straightforward.

The next important thing is to get source tagging properly implemented, so that *all* conclusions (including relationships) can be associated with their sources. While you're at it, fixing Notes/Discussions/Reasons would be a Good Thing; hopefully, this would have the end result of Notes being associateable with conclusions, just like source citations.

Once all of those things are fixed, then you can maybe think about adding a two-way conclusion type for all of the various ways that people can be connected, such as godparents, employers, executors, etc. Call the conclusion "Relationship", and have a field for "Description" (perhaps separately for each person: "PID1 was the ___ of PID2" on PID1's page, "PID2 was the ___ of PID1" on PID2's page). This could be used for all sorts of non-familial relationships, as well as for familial ones that skip a person or persons, such as "grandparent" or "sibling". (If Notes were properly fixed, it would not be needed for "twin", although people would of course be free to use it for that, too.)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Ture, Lyle. Jeff is correct, of course. The normal types used in a couple relationship are indeed events or facts, not relationships.

I'm not quite sure what Joe is asked for, but right now the relationships are limited to guardian, step-, etc., for the child-parent relationship. For couples, the relationship is either married or not married. For couples, living together is a relationship type, where as the type of marriage or separation event is not.

If Joe is looking for relationship types that are not events, but in reality, facts, then living together and living separately fall into that category. But they are also time sensitive. How long did a couple live together? Was it from a certain point in time to the death of one of the persons, or was it from a certain point in time to a later point in time?

Now if you go beyond a couple relationship (not event), the ideas expressed about employer-employee relationships makes sense. So does caregiver-care recipient. But like living together (regardless of a formal status or lack thereof), the question is then the time period.

Historically, there is certainly a master-slave relationship, as despicable as that may be, along with master-(indentured) servant with a specific time element. My immigrant ancestor Pieter Claesen is an example of either employer-employee or master-endentured servant, or person-ward or sponsor-sponsored or a combination of those (I don't know, but I do not believe it was master-endentured servant). There were at least two colonies in Virginia wherein immigrants worked off their passage in an endentured servant scenario.

Coming up to current times, with exchange students, there is also the house-hold-student relationship.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Getting back to Lyle's earlier comment about siblings can involve a parent-child type of relationship..

There are instances today where an older sibling is raising a younger sibling after both were orphaned. The "system" involves foster parents, whether the person is a child or elderly.

Taking this one step further, Assisted Living and Nursing Homes also involve relationships along the line of caregiver-care recipient.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The only one that you mentioned, Juli, is executor -- as in the executor of a will. If not that, could you explain the executor role (and not the grim reaper kind).

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I agree that godparent-child is definitely a type of relationship -- and they are recorded as such with baptism/christening records.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The question then becomes what to do with these relationships that are outside the traditional family relationships? Do they involve tracing back ancestral lines? Should they?

I have three lines that I follow and one of them is my step-mother's ancestral lineage. At what point (I was sixteen when my father remarried after my mother's death some ten years earlier) does a step-relationship actually form that takes the step-parent to the equivalent level of parent? Is it when the couple relationship forms with respect to the age of the child(ren)? And if so, then what is the age? Sixteen (my case), eighteen, twenty-one or something tied to the laws at the time?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: How does a grown adult look upon any subsequent marriages of the biological parent with respect to the spouse? Does the adult see the spouse as a step-parent or simply another spouse of the biological parent? (By the way, I am equating adoptive and biological relationships as the same for this question.)

LegacyUser

joe martel said: Thanks this is along the lines of what I'm looking for.
Caveat - I have no control over what feature is added or worked on. I'm just collecting your thoughts on the various types of other relationships/roles between people.

I know the spousal and parent-child relationships have a number of issues we've discussed since day one of FSFT. I agree it would be great to tackle those. But that is not the topic here.

So far I hear these are other relationships to consider:
Godparent, Siblings. I was also thinking more than Twins, say Triplet... Or maybe team-mate, or Companion or...

Other Relationship possibilities:
Twin/Triplet...
Godparent(s)
Household/boarder
Ancestor/Descendant (i.e. grandparent...)(skipping missing generations)
Sibling
Cousin
Honored ancestor (Asian)
Friend
Neighbor
Apprentice/master, servant
Employer/Employee
Team mate
Companion

Keep it going and feel free to express which you think are more critical. And if more than 2 PID Relationships (Triplet, team mate... is important.

Also the complexities around how to handle these in Merge, Possible Duplicates, Tree View (skipping generations)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I like these kinds of requests, Joe.

Even though you do not any control over what features are developed. the very act of us responding to your requests, gets the idea in front of those teams who read the discussions in this forum.

Thank you for your service to this feedback community.

LegacyUser

Alahärmä said: These situations would be better handled, if you just didn't have to create the junk parent but the tree would allow (structured) gaps in relationships.

LegacyUser

m said: Parent-named-on-record.
Biological parent.

(Fathered by male who is not the one named on the records.) NPE. (VERY common----needs addressing.

LegacyUser

MAC said: Sibling is the one that comes up most often for me. There are a few cases I've seen where we know people are siblings but don't know who their parents are -- being able to add the relationship without having to create placeholder parents would be excellent.

It would also be helpful if there were, for lack of a better term, anti-relationships. I have been recently been having a lot of trouble with users repeatedly adding clearly incorrect/unproven parents (which are problematic because FamilySearch generally doesn't want to intervene). It may be helpful to have a way to just mark the parents as unproven, disproven, or theoretical, rather than have to delete them. This way, it would make it easy to attach explanations/sources about why it is such that remain associated with the person, but also not have these parents show up in trees/fan charts.

As an aside, I see a lot of cases where users have added placeholder spouses or parents where they don't really seem to be adding any additional information. (The only two scenarios where it makes sense to me are the siblings with unknown parents scenario, or perhaps adding a placeholder person where you know something about them, like DNA composition). Should we be asking FamilySearch to delete these, or can we just detach them and move on?

LegacyUser

Paul said: Mark

Firstly, it does not seem FamilySearch has ever considered being able to add individuals as siblings, but without a parent. Years ago, when I encountered details in a will that confirmed two individuals were brothers, I brought the issue here and was told the only option was to create a parent for them. Who knows, they could have been illegitimate children of a woman of that surname, but I went ahead (as advised) and created a father for them - no first name, same surname. I have always felt uncomfortable about this, as the only detail I could attach to "him" was a note explaining why the ID had been added to Family Tree. I would very much like to see a way of adding sibling relationships without the need of a "made-up" parent.

Secondly, if someone creates a spouse or parent for which there is no evidence, I would be inclined to detach them from the relationship. I am not an LDS church member, but would not want to provide advice that caused problems with ordinances. However, I do hate those "invented" IDs, especially when the sole purpose has been to add an unknown mother / wife. We are now advised to adopt my preferred option and leave the details blank. However, under a previous program, there were countless thousands of females created named "?" (they all seem to have IDs beginning with a "4"). You might have ten of these placed against each (same named) father, but I was advised not to discard them when the mother is finally identified. But I do resent merging (say) ten IDs named ? with a real person. I would prefer just not to carry them over when making merges within a family, but advised this might affect ordinances. The other thing I hate is when users themselves create a "Mrs John Smith" as a spouse, because they have no evidence of the name of the wife / mother. I also feel inclined to detach these if they have nothing inputted against their IDs. We all know a child has to have had a biological mother, but why do some people feel a need to create an ID for those of whom no name or other detail is known?

LegacyUser

Juli said: Regarding Joe's comment about "the complexities around how to handle these in Merge, Possible Duplicates, Tree View (skipping generations)": my thought is that a simple labeled link between profiles, filed under Other Information, would solve these questions handily. Such entities would behave just like anything else under "Other" -- you could bring them over or discard them in a merge, they would not really be considered by Possible Duplicates, and they would not show in any tree views.

The only complication compared to, say, a residence would be what to do with the other end of the link in case of merge: would it be possible for the PID to automatically update? Or (actually better) for there to be a Data Problem flag on the other end, so that a user could evaluate whether the relationship still applies with the merge survivor?

If other relationships were handled in such a labeled link under Other, then FS would not need to collect any sort of list of relationships: people could enter whatever they felt appropriate in the description.

One can sort of improvise a link between profiles currently, using Notes, but they're well-hidden, and there's no way to have an active link; you have to copy-and-paste PIDs. Also, you have to do each end separately (and then keep them synchronized manually). It would therefore take more motivation than I've ever mustered to actually set something up for mere godparents or wedding witnesses.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: My thoughts about implementation of other relationships is very close to what Juli has described. While some of the suggested relationships have limited value such as grandparent when parents are not known. I would hate to see every person in the tree have a link to grandparents as they are clearly identified if the tree if complete. I personally do not believe I would use other relationships very often but can see the benefit in a limited number of situations.

LegacyUser

Juli said: One use I can envision for an "other relationship" function is to track "is this the same family?" using godparents. It would only work in those places/times where siblings had the same godparents, and it would take some work to find or set up all of the relevant profiles to link between, but it could help solidify some otherwise-shaky conclusions.

LegacyUser

m said: Off topic but I tried to make a thread with 2 computer bugs and it said "Slug has already been taken" (!) and did not appear in All Topics. Later I made 2 separate threads and they looked like they were successful but I looked at All Topics and they did not appear.

LegacyUser

m said: I made thread with 2 computer bugs was successful but I wanted to add a photo of the problem so when I added the photo it gave and error "Slug has already been taken" (red !) error and it did not appear in All Topics-----the thread never posted.

Are we not able to add photos to threads any more?

[This is off topic because I was unable to post a thread---and I think it is because it had a photo in it because that is the point at which I got the "Slug has already been taken" (red !) error.]