It would be a positive change to NOT use the gender-related words "husband" / "wife" but use the wor

LegacyUser

Alice Colby Volkert said: As **** relationship are becoming more and more common this would avoid causing hurt feelings .

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Cousin David said: Regrettably, the percentage of the LGBT community that are married is even smaller than the actual percentage of US that identify as such - ~4%. The option in this area for same gender marriages is adequate.

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Juli said: The relevance of new laws and hurt feelings to the genealogy of deceased persons eludes me. I think it's helpful to use the gender-role-specific terms, so that in the overwhelming majority of cases where it's a man and a woman, people know which spouse to put where.

I think it'd be much more important to replace the "first/last name" labels. They're especially confusing when I switch the name's language to a surname-first language. Call them what they are, not where they occur: not first name, but given name, and not last name, but surname or family name.

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Tom Huber said: The husband and wife designation is common among **** couples. There is no reason not to use such designations.

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Cousin David said: Are most aware of the drop-down box above the name in the “Person” page which gives difference language/National formats?

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Paul said: Obviously this is not an issue confined to **** relationships. Going back generations, there have always been couples who never married, so the husband and wife terms are not applicable to them either. In the latter case "spouse" is not particularly appropriate. "Partner" might seem a good term, but that is usually associated with unmarried couples.

Choosing a catch-all term doesn't seem to be that straightforward.

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Adrian Bruce said: You are right, Paul. I confess that I've been dealing with genealogy so long that my mind just treats "Husband" and "Wife" as filler text for a number of concepts - and therefore I miss how they might not be appropriate and miss how tricky an alternative might be...