I’m new to Roots Magic.
I’m adding my family tree and have reached the oldest known Grandparent.
I don’t know who his parents are but I have the names of his siblings.
I can’t see how to enter the siblings without creating a dummy record for the unknown parents of them all, so I can add them as children. Is this the best route or would you suggest another?
thank you!
If you want to keep the siblings linked together, pretty much the only option is to create a dummy parent. In my case, I would and a record for Mr. Smith (Mr. being entered in the first name field, Smith in the surname field, then I would attach your oldest known grandparent as a child, along with the oldest known grandparents sibling. There is no real need to enter a dummy record for a mother at this point, but you probably could if you wanted. Then if you do find a name for the parents, you can replace Mr. or Mrs with their given names.
I have a closely related issue in that I have two men who I suspect very strongly to have been brothers. One of them was my direct ancestor and one of them was not.
The two men were strongly suspected of having been brothers even before we had DNA evidence. We now have Y-DNA evidence from descendants of both purported brothers which shows that the two men were closely related. The Y-DNA evidence is strong enough to suggest that the men might have been brothers, but the Y-DNA evidence can’t rule out other possibilities such that the two men might have been first cousins or might have been an uncle and a nephew.
So I have a dummy father for the two men. But rather than naming the dummy father Mr. Smith, I name him “possible and unproven father of John and William” as the given name and “Smith” as the surname.
Another option is to create an Association. There is a “Relative” association type.
Many thanks to all of you for your thoughts. It helps to have a reality check that one is on the right track.
The drawback with this method will be that you end up with floating trees, an increased tree count, as the association feature doesn’t connect what will be separate trees.
I have a dummy person for my unconnected trees. I add each branch as children to the person. When I find out where they fit I unlink them and add them to the main tree. Color coding helps me to tell them apart from my main tree.
:WIth the dummy parent method, I do get an indication from the Set Relationships process that the other branch of the family from the purported brother is a part of my family. I do have to remember to check to see if the relationship from people in that family is from my purported brother or from the other purported brother. But the relationship that is shown is a cue to look. It also provides at least an approximate indication of how closely related the people are to me who are descended from the other purported brother.
I add parents. If I don’t know a forename or surname I use five underscores. If I know nothing of the parents of John Mackenzie I will add father _____ Mackenzie, born 30 years before whatever accurate or guessed-at date of birth for John, and who married mother _____ _____ at age 25. If a date is calculated from (say) an age at a census, then the dates are ABT. If the dates are just stabs in the dark then it’s PRHPS. Result full families with names, dates and places that can be corrected as the data comes in.