Adopted only by mother

RootsMagic
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1

I have a question,
after the husband died, the widow adopted somebody, (if i ad the fact adopted i can only ad the husband and wife as adopted parents, but the adoption was 30 years after the husband was dead.. how can i make that it show only adopted to the wife ?

Jan

2

I believe the closest You can approximate, to reality, is not select a Father (ie. skip) when adding Parents, then set the Relationship to Mother as Adopted and Relationship to Father as Unknown (unless You know, for sure, the Adoptee was kin to Mother’s deceased Husband). At its core, RM is essentially a tree and blood relationship program (thus the rarity of single Parent adoption is a “kludge” at best).

3

My Aunt (Born 1920) was half sibling to my father (this was not learned /proven til much later as it was kept secret). My Grandmother (fathers mother) was the birth mother.
My Grandfather adopted “GL” years after they were married. My Grandfather is the adopted father. So same basic scenario but reversed parent roles looks like this in RM

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4

I was playing around with this one just now, and it is curiously easy - much easier than I remembered. The following should work. Suppose the couple is John Smith and Mary Jones.

  • Right click Mary Jones as choose the Add Child option.
  • You will be in the Add Child screen. At the top of the screen, there will be a box that says something to the effect of John Smith and Mary Jones. Click on that box and a second option will appear, namely something to the effect of Mary Jones and another spouse. Choose that second option.
  • Continue by adding the information about the new child. I was not asked to provide any information about another spouse. The new child was added only to Mary Jones and not to John Smith.

You can verify that you have the new child connected only to Mary Jones by highlighting Mary, switching to Descendant View, setting Descendant View to 2 generations, and right clicking Mary and choosing Position > Primary Position. I don’t know if it will happen every time, but I also had to click on Spouses and then Rearrange in the top half of the sidebar to get the family with Mary and the adopted child to be in the second position of Mary’s family’s rather than the first.

Actually, it’s the stuff after you get the new child added just to Mary that’s the messiest part.

  • In RM7, highlighting a person and switching to Descendant View always put the highlighted person into the primary position without further ado. For mysterious reasons unknown to me, RM8/9/10 does not do that. In my opinion, the RM7 behavior in this regard was much superior and I want it back.
  • In all of RM7/8/9/10. a newly added family for a person often but not always has the multiple families in the wrong order. It seems to default to putting the newly added family first, when last would surely be a better default. No default will be correct 100% of the time in this situation. But defaulting last instead of first would probably be better most of the time. Actually, when there are spouses and marriages involved, it should default according to marriage dates. But in this case, there was no spouse and no marriage for the second family, so I think it should default to adding the new family last instead of first.
5

“I must thank you for the good explanation. I think it would be easier when, at the point of adoption, you could choose whether it is adopted by the father, the mother, or by both.”

Jan