We need a option under relationship to child as "Other"

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: Does not matter. With this open edit "wild west" FamilySearch "Family Tree where anything can be changed by (Anyone), means things will probably look very different in the future anyway.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: That's fine if it is really what you want. It's just that there might be a lot of people wondering why both of those couples got married in Russia the way you documented it. And it sure ain't gonna help the hints engine getting useful sources sent to those records for you now, since they will now be looking for matches in Russia as well.

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: Don't know why we are so particular in an open edit database?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Don, Please don't shoot me. I'm just the Messenger trying to help!
:-)

When systems are set up to do things in a particular fashion, I have found that deviating from that standard to do something different that is unique for my own purposes, inevitably, someone is going to come along and change it to fit that "standard" pattern. And it will keep happening again and again.

It's not so important for me to convince you of something as I'm trying reduce potential frustration when stuff that you've spent so much time trying to set up "in a particular" way gets changed by others "in an open database"

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I have a situation in a descendant line of one of my ancestors where a child was born to a mother who had a one night stand with a man whose name was never recorded anywhere. Extensive research took place, but nothing was ever found about the person.

Since this took place well over 100 years ago, everyone is deceased.

What happened is that the mother lived with her parents, who helped raised the child and provided for the child's well being (food, shelter, etc.). They were the child's guardian.

In the tree, the child is listed with the mother and no father with the default of biological. The child is also listed with the mother as a child to the mother's parents, but the relationship there is guardian to both the mother's mother and father.

Here is how it is recorded in the tree (and I've had this reviewed by the Temple Presidency when we took care of the sealing)




Note that there is no flyout for the mother as the mother of the child. So the relationship between the mother and child is recorded as a note -- that the mother was single and the father is unknown.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: It should be noted that there will be instances when normal ecclesiastical practices are not followed. In the case above, that layout does follow the correct ecclesiastical requirements for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The way things are set up now, with the current family relationships, I would have to add a father in order to show the mother living with someone. Because it was a one-night stand (acknowledged by the family several decades ago) about the only thing that should be done is some way to prevent "Add Father" as an option.

Presently, this is not possible and so it is entirely possible that someone will eventually find a record (possibly an obituary) that has the details about the child's father. But I think that is very unlikely. The mother's only contact with the father was the one-night stand. So it is likely that the father never knew that he had impregnated the mother.

Since this one night stand took place before DNA testing became common to determine paternity, it is unlikely that anything further will ever be found. The child was a female and she carries no Y-DNA that is passed to her children.

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: Jeff Wiseman - Might point out for the record that it does not matter if someone comes along and takes the NEVER MARRIED out of the marriage event, or corrects this back to the way FamilySearch wants things to show. The Temple database already shows my Great Great Grandmother being sealed to these men she had relationships with. I don't think I did that. Don't remember doing it. It was done in 1997.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I'd like to add one more view here that further emphasizes Tom's great explanation that this "layout does follow the correct ecclesiastical requirements for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints".

If you change the focus of the view to the child herself (Rita), then the fact that she had TWO sets of parents within a family context becomes very clear:



Since without the birth father's name, the child can't be sealed directly to Cornelia, so here is a good example where the child is sealed to the "parents" of her family, in this case being her grandparents.



No additions of any other relationship types are needed to handle these less common circumstances.

Great example!

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: The two illegitimate children of my Great Great Grandmother are also showing in the Temple database that they are sealed to my Great Great Grandmother and my Great Great Grandfather. I am not showing this in this "Family Tree" open edit database because it upset David Newton.

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: Okay - Jeff Wiseman - you win. Have taken NEVER MARRIED out of the Marriage Event, and this will be the last of this conversation. Find it odd that FamilySearch wants perfection in an open edit database.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Again Don, *I* am not FamilySearch, and you certainly don't need to be making changes just to please me. I'm not trying to "win" anything here.

I'm just sharing what I understand about how the system functions (or DOESN'T function in some cases :-) so that folks won't run into confusing situations due to side effects of how the system works.

Good luck with that!

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: I am trying not to be contentious, but since I have already talked about our open edit FamilySearch "Family Tree" in this thread, I want to say something more, I apologize to Randy Rudeen for hijacking his "Feedback."

Since we were talking about my Great Great Grandmother, I want to point out that I can not show them in this open edit database how I would really like to show them, because of some complaining.

Notice my Great Great Grandfathers family in the following screenshot. Then notice my Great Great Grandmothers two children by other men.

I would like to show the two children by the other men also in my Great Great Grandfathers family, (since he is sealed to them), but get complaints because my Great Great Grandfather died before these children were born, is why I do hot show them in this open edit database. You would think that of all places, this open edit database would be the only place I could show them like I want them.

LegacyUser

Randy Rudeen said: Don M Thomas, no worries. We are all trying to make FamilySearch even better. Maybe we need a presentation from FamilySearch that show all the examples of relationship options. They could number them and when someone has a question (which happens often) on how to show a situation that is not the "nuclear" family, then FamilySearch would clearly recommend which number to use.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Randy

My post at https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... might be of some interest to you. My example is similar to your "Child conceived by another man, while mother is married to her husband", but relates to a "child conceived by another woman, while father is married to his wife"!

The problem with children born to parents who were never married to each other is that circumstances can be so different between different cases. A mother might have brought up a child alone or gone on to marry a man who became the child's step-father. She might have had the child following a one-night stand, and, for his part, the father might have had nothing to do with the child at all, had separate homes with both his wife and the unmarried woman, provided financially for the child, or had a totally unknown relationship with the child.

Obviously, you do know about the particular example to which you are referring. However, as shown, there can be many sets of circumstances and in some cases (especially those of hundreds of years ago) the true relationships will never be established.

The main problem appears to be in being able to find a straightforward way of showing the relationship situation, without you (and other users) having to delve into notes that are "hidden away" in another section of a person's record. Given the complex nature of the subject, I believe the problem might prove to be quite difficult for FamilySearch to address, to the satisfaction of "all" its users.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: And I hesitate to point this out for fear of misunderstanding, but the requirements of the LDS Church may be different from the requirements that non members have. If there's a degree of flakiness over the entries for my 3G GPs, well, that's inevitable to me. Church practices may, however, wish for a greater degree of clarity over their relationship in order to decide whether to proceed - or not - with ordinances. Or so it appears to me as a non member. I guess that we *all* have different priorities in this area.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Adrian,

the requirements of the LDS Church may be different from the requirements that non members have

Make no bones about it, the requirements of the LDS Church *ARE* different from the requirements that many members and non members alike personally have.

As you have alluded to, people coming to the FSFT all have different (and some, extremely different) expectations of what the tool is supposed to support. I.e., what the requirements are that it is built from.

In the commercial world, the requirements for new products are prioritized in almost always the same fashion. I.e., develop a product that can maximize the financial profits of the company creating it. Achieving this is always based on developing a product that meets the needs and wants of the customer's using it at a price point that many will pay in order to maximize the income to the company.

For a commercially sold Genealogical database tool, this would typically contain requirements of ease of access to sources, ease of navigation and documentation, consistent terminology/structure, and the INability of anyone else to modify or corrupt data that the customer has assembled.

However, in the case of FamilySearch--who is the primary customer they are serving? Although we all benefit from the tools, WE are NOT the primary customer! We are only the primary USERS of the system. The requirements for this system are theological in nature. They are based on the needs and desires of the Lord as revealed through his prophet and leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (sorry, but them's the facts :-)

Now I don't speak for the church, but I do believe that the requirements for the FSFT include things like:

- Provide place to organize data prior to submission of temple work and reduce the amount of duplicate work that was happening (although duplicate work still happens a lot, FS has significantly succeeded at this goal)

- Provide a tool that will help ENTIRE families including the children and the older "senile" types (like me) grow closer together and become familiar with their extended families.

- Provide a way to quickly collect as many names and accurate data to uniquely identify person records suitable for temple work to be done.

The shared tree concept is directly related to both the second and third bullets. It is being achieved by getting as many eyes on the same data as possible so that errors can be found quickly and corrected. Obviously, this is in direct opposition of a person wanting "their" data to be unmodifiable to others. But the primary requirement by the primary customer (again, who is not us) is for the data to be common and to be shared.

Because of the familial benefits of working in the FSFT, the church wants anyone who might benefit from this to be freely allowed to use the tools. This is actually part of the Church's mission. However, when those folks using the tools (members or otherwise) want things changed to meet their own wants in a way that is tangential to the theological requirements imposed by the church leadership, it ain't gonna happen.

When we as users suggest things that would make the system more effective or efficient at meeting the theological mandates of the church, FS always considers them and frequently will implement them.

And I do believe that many of the "loose controls" that FS seems to frequently exhibit in areas of the tree are due to these other church driven mandates that they must meet. However, I also believe that some of these are just bad engineering choices. But since I am not privy to all the mandates that FS is working to, it is hard for me to discern between them.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Thanks Jeff. I suspect that I was thinking vaguely along those lines of who the real customer is, but you've clarified matters. I don't have a problem with those ideas, just to be clear.

DorRuS_01

A custom field would be even better. That way we can create the exact relationship we want. I have a death record for an ancestor which lists an informant with whom the relationship is unknown. I would the custom relationship to be "Informant."

Gail Swihart Watson

Never married will only confuse things. I have an adopted relative whose bio parents never married each other, but they certainly married other people and this adopted relative has numerous half siblings from each bio-parent's marriage. Never married is not helpful. My adopted relative has 3 sets of parents attached and it is crystal clear how this relative is related to each of the 6 people.