allow us to put someone's siblings on there even though we don't know their parents

LegacyUser

daniel martinez said: I know a couple of my ancestor's siblings but I don't know who their parents are and I would like to put their siblings but I can't since I don't know who the parents are it gets me frustrated at times, please consider this thank you for your time.

LegacyUser

JT said: Especially needed if both parents are still alive, but you don't want to create another (eventual) duplicate for them.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Daniel

When I raised this issue some years ago I was given the advice to add a parent, using just the last name of the siblings concerned. I did this by adding a father of the same surname, with obviously no vitals (or first name) inputted. Okay, the siblings might have all been born illegitimately to a mother of that name, but this should be far less likely - especially if there are several siblings.

Not completely satisfactory, I agree, but the only way I can see you can show siblings as a unit on Family Tree.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: As Paul indicated above, because of the the way relationships are created in Family Tree it is impossible to connect siblings without at least one parent to commonly link them together. IE all of the siblings are linked to a common parent. To construct in any other way would require a significant change to the system. Paul's suggestion is the only option I have seen to resolve this issue. For one of the parents create a very minimally described person and then link the children. All children have parents and if they truly are siblings that means they have the same parents. Therefore you create just one of the unknown parents and link the children.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: I echo gasmodels. A relational database needs to have "relations" to tie people together (in this instance).

The database has records for an individual, an individual and a spouse, and an individual to a parent (or conversely a parent to a child, but it's easier to do a child to a parent relationship, since a child has only two parents to link to, but a parent can have multiple children)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Paul

That is exactly what I do. By having the placeholder there you have at least two or three benefits:

- The structure of the family is actually recorded in the tree

- There is a place to record any tidbits about the parents that ARE known (see next point)

- This facilitates the search engine finding family groups. E.g., in a census, the source linker could pull up all the siblings and more easily could actually provide a name.

If you have evidence showing siblings, I would include it in the tree. Obviously if a parent is know to be living, it needs to go in your private space.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I have an actual situation where I know that siblings held land next to each other (tax and local records), but I do not have any parental information for any of them. Therefore, I did as Paul suggested and entered as a parent, the surname of the family, and then entered each of the siblings as a child.

I made a note in the life sketch area and also as a discussion point about what I did and why.

LegacyUser

Chris Grant said: According to Hume's Law, "is" does not imply "ought". The fact that FamilySearch has chosen to make wedlock and parenthood the fundamental relationships ought of which all other representable relationships must be derived does not mean that this is the way that things must be or should be. Indeed, FamilySearch has recently made fundamental structural changes to enable the direct representation of relationships that were largely uncontemplated a couple of generations ago. This action was justified on the general principle of representing the real world. That general principle seems to support the OP's request.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yes, a marriage is only one of several types of couple relationship events that can occur. Furthermore, a married couple is only one of several types of couple relationships that can exist. Although related, marriage relationships, and marriage events are not the same thing. It'll be nice when they finally get the correct terminology put into the system