Options for marriage data

LegacyUser

Melinda Silver said: This may be true, but it is still in violation of Church policy to seal people who were never married and never lived together.

LegacyUser

Brett said: Melinda

Spot on.

Unless, of course, approval is sought; and, subsequently, granted by the First Presidency.

Brett

LegacyUser

Melinda Silver said: Still trying to bring this topic up as I do not see any changes:

I am posting a suggestion here in hopes that perhaps someone with a connection to the Programmers and FamilySearch can bring it up.

ILLEGITIMACY. I really feel that when a child is illegitimate, with a truly unknown father [typically appear in records as "Hijo natural"], there should be a word that you can enter which will grey out the father box on the FanChart and all of that section of the fan.
Here is my situation: I have been asked to help a member of a Stake Presidency finish his 4 generation chart as we have been asked to have everyone in Stake Leadership fulfill 8 specific goals and that is one of them. Here is the problem. He is from Colombia and his mother was illegitimate, the father is unknown. In fact his grandmother had multiple children with multiple men after her husband left her and disappeared.
How can you reflect this on the tree. I found this article in the wiki: Colombian illegitimacy. https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/...
Is there some word like -- UNKNOWN - Perhaps that can be put in the box so his Fan Chart doesn't have a blank? And so it doesn't appear that the 4 Generation chart is incomplete?
What is the appropriate way to handle the BIG WHITE SPACE - so it is not just a BIG WHITE SPACE. Everyone will be posting their 4 generation chart on the wall at and activity and the white space is super obvious.
Also, there is a great deal of illegitimacy throughout his chart for the reasons listed in the article. So there are huge gaps in his 5th, 6th and 7th generations too. Obviously, we will never know who the father was, but shouldn't there be some way to distinguish between information which needs to be found and information that does not and will not exist in the records.
In my own family tree, I have tons of "Mrs. Smiths". Because there was a legitimate unknown wife. What do we do when clearly there is a Dad, but he is unknown? There is no MR. Garcia. Just a sperm donor.
It is likely that many of these empty father spaces were created when the mother was indigenous and the father is "unknown" -- likely of Spanish decent. I just think it would be helpful to be able to grey out the areas for which research is not possible due to illegitimacy.

What do you all think? Am I the only person with this problem? Ideas??

LegacyUser

joe martel said: Melinda, this is a pretty old thread so you may not get many opinions. Here is my opinion.

If a parent is unknown then I do not enter a person. I know there is a father but I just don't know enough about him to enter him. So I have a bunch of single-parent families. And that is ok by me. There may never be records, but it may someday be found, say in some long lost journal... To me the big white space is ok. I, and many people have big white spaces and I hope someday I or a relative will know something. To me having Mr. X gives a false sense of completeness when it is simply not there, yet.

I was wondering about "everyone will be posting their 4 generation chart". If that is for others to see that makes me personally uneasy and whether I have something to hide or not, I see it as more of a personal experience. But maybe that's just me. 

LegacyUser

Venitar said: We al have some of those families. If the child has a different surname than the mother, I assume it is the surname of the father, and enter a place holder for him, i.e. Mr. Lewis.

LegacyUser

Hannah Morgan Ackroyd said: I think that in the relationship info section when it shows the person's spouse/partner there should be a place where you can add if they were ever sealed/married. And if someone never married, put that in the "Collabrate" section.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This really should have been a new discussion...

But, one of the goals of FamilySearch FamilyTree is to build a complete (as far as humanly possible) 'family of mankind' that has one record for every person who has lived and their place in the family that makes up mankind.

As such, each person has two parents -- one who is in the father role and one who is in the mother role.

When a child is the result of a "one night stand" and the name of the father is not known, someone helped raise the child -- today, there are single parents that do an admirable job by themselves, largely thanks to social programs that support their efforts. In the past, those programs were not available and so unless the mother (or father) remarried, a single parent home was very unusual.

Anyway, I had the "one night stand" happen in a branch of my family, and after researching the situation, I found the mother lived with her parents, who helped raise the child. While the child appears as the biological offspring of the mother, the child also appears as the guardian offspring of the mother's parents.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Whenever this situation exists, on the details page of the child's record in the Family Section, you have the option of selecting which set of parents (which appear on the left with the child in bold) to follow. Click the preferred box for the path you want to follow on the various types of pedigree charts, including fan charts.