Problems with Step Relationships - Mother vs Father

LegacyUser

iLoveMyLife02 said: Twice I have added a "Step" relationship for a living family member's Mother, and FSFT keeps adding to his record that he has a Step-father, even when the screen immediately after making the change is CORRECT with Lucille shown as Step-mother. This problem has started since FSFT started showing females above males in some screens, instead of the old standard of "Male" at top, and "Female" on the lower half of pages. You won't be able to see most of this, of course, because both this relative and his brother are Living Persons.

I HAVE reported this problem to the Help Desk.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The male - female relationship is one that we've been told is a known problem and hopefully, before long, it will be resolved.

The problem is demonstrated in the https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... discussion about six days ago (toward the bottom of the discussion.

Some of the problem has been resolved, but not entirely. Miss Huber (unmarried) is now consistently shown in the correct place in her box. But not her mother, who is the focus person in the tree.


She remains out of place if I change the focus person to her father. However, if I change the focus person to Miss Huber, she remains in the correct position.

This problem has not been resolved fully. Only if there is no spouse listed does the female remain in the correct position in a tree view.

I tried signing out and then signing back in again, and the problem remained with Sarah Belle Anthony remaining in the upper position.

But, when I made Miss Huber the focus person, the parents' positions reverted to the way it should be.

Here is the sequence that puts things out of place for a female.

Open the landscape pedigree view.

1, Click on any femaie on the display and select "tree". This places the focus of the refreshed chart on the female and places her in the upper position (incorrect when no **** relationship is involved).

2. Now click on the father (Henry Miller Anthony) and make him the focus. Sarah Belle Anthony remains in the upper position, although she is now shown as a child.

Changing the pedigree view (Portrait, Descendancy, and Fan -- and back to landscape) does not correct the problem.

Changing the focus to a sibling and back to the father does not correct the problem.

3. Now select one of Sarah Belle Anthony's children -- it doesn't matter which one and make them the focus of the tree. That action corrects the problem.

This still is a problem and so I repeated the above information in a couple of other discussions.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: In family search there are 2 relationships that set the display order.

1) a couple relationship (spouse1 and spouse2)

2) a parent/Child relationship (parent1 and parent2)

Both help describe the order in which things are displayed.

In this case, the child that has the wrong Step relationship displayed has his mother (spouse2) in the parent1 spot and his father (spouse1) in the parent2 spot.
This mismatch is causing the display bug.

If you click the switch parent position for the parentChild Relationship, the display issue should go away.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Lyle, the last time I looked, the "Switch Positions" button was not available for a regular male/female couple relationship. It was only available for a **** relationship. Furthermore, the knowledge article on this (if I could find it) indicates that this tool capability is NOT supposed to be available for male/female couples.

However, your example appears to be on the child-parent relationship. I don't think that it is supposed to be there either. I just made a quick check and the "Switch Parent Positions" button is in fact missing for male/female parents as it should be.

Your last sentence says to fix the OP's issue by switching the parents positions, but since the parents are both a male and female, I do not think that this is possible (and shouldn't be anyway)

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: Switch Positions is also available for non-traditional order (parent1/Female and parent2/Male) (spouse1/Female and spouse2/Male) The UI usually does a good job of keeping traditional order, so it doesn't come up much.

In this case only the parentChild relationship is flipped. So you wouldn't notice it unless you go to the landscape pedigree of the child. (and of course the bug in this issue)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Once the bug is resolved, then we can look at the switch positions feature. For now, the bug is creating a problem that needs to be resolved, first.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: That's really up to @iLoveMyLife02. Knowing that a work around is available is also valuable.

LegacyUser

iLoveMyLife02 said: Why would they even OFFER an option to switch? I would never expect to find that, and I certainly never read the fine print way down at the bottom of that screen. It doesn't even display until I scroll down, due to the length of the display vs the height of my screen.. I prefer for things to always display in a standard, predictable manner. But thanks for the information.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: iLoveMyLife02,

This is a bit of a guess on my part, but I think it has to do with the mechanics of documenting the different relationships to parents. With male and female parents, it is easy enough. If you say Adoptive father and Biological mother it's pretty obvious, but when you have (say) 2 women raising the child, one may be the biological and the other an adoptive parent.

Now, having that distinction, it's harder to discern with the **** couple. E.g., which name goes on top and which on the bottom in a pedigree chart. And in the Family relationship Areas of the site, do you just say "Spouse #1" adoptive and Spouse #2 biological? Who is spouse #1 and who is Spouse #2?

It is just my guess that FS may be just adding extra flexibility to the user interface to allow that situation to be accommodated for.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: That situation has been accommodated for a long time. The child is listed twice -- once with the biological mother and biological father and then again with the step or adoptive or guardianship mother (if the father and this second "mother" lived together).

What got strange for me (personally) was that I now have three ancestral lines to follow -- my biological father's, my biological mother's, and my step mother's.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Verified. This appears to work correctly now.

My thanks to the team(s) responsible for getting this fixed.

Now the issue(s) (if any) with the representation of step- and other relationship situations can be addressed.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Almost, but not completely:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The display issue has been fully resolved. The **** relationship can be either way and has the option of being manually switched.

But, there is a problem, but not with the display order of the couple. It is with the events involved in a relationship. While marriage, divorce, annulment and common law all can have dates associated with them. Living together has a date only if it can be determined when the couple moved into the same household.

The problem there is that a marriage-divorce-marriage is not handled (or at least the last time I checked, which was several months ago) in a serial manner and displayed as such.

This points up the flaw in the Family area of a person's profile and FamilySearch has done nothing to start over, but only to patch the present system. It really does need a full redesign and rewrite that also involves sourcing as well as child-parent relationships and the associated events.

Jeff's link points to that discussion and I've drawn the same conclusion. The whole area needs to be designed from the ground up and set it up correctly, rather than continue to patch what is essentially a "broken" system. It is sadly reminiscent of the ongoing issues with GEDCOM ingestion into FamilyTree.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: But, I do recognize that both the Family area redesign and the GEDCOM issues are going to take some serious resources to make right (which means starting over, just like the merge system was redesigned from the group up) and therefore, I'm in hopes that the resources can be found to take care of these areas of concern.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Or, Jeff, in the case of two men and a baby -- neither may be biological but both can be adoptive.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Ok, here's an odd one. The fact of the matter is that ONE of those men could, in fact, be the biological Father. If those 2 men have been legally married, then the child would have one biological father and the other could be Gurdian, adoptive, etc. However, even though it seems really out of context from the traditional use of the term, the second father might even be classified as a "Step" father as he could be the second legal spouse of the biological father (assuming that the biological father was originally married to the child's biological mother). Maybe it would be a step-spouse?

The parent-child relationships in **** marriages is going to be a big can of worms for FS to figure out, mainly because the legal systems haven't even gotten around to figuring out the terminology and legalities to be used in these new legally recorded situations.

Lots of work ahead :-)