Thanks for the answers on recording my half-sister in RM8 against my mother and her biological father. Now we have connected and as she was adopted at birth, she has records of her adoptive family which we would like to record. Is the best way to do this to give her another set of parents and tag them as adopted Mum & Dad? Advice please…
I am not sure there is one best way. It is certainly the case that RM supports more than one set of parents for an individual, and this is the way most RM users enter the data. The same “more than one set of parents” technique is also supported by GEDCOM and so usually transfers to software other than RM.
RM also supports different types of parental relationships. For example, one set of parents can be given type biological parents and another set of parents can be given type adoptive parents. And within a set parents, one parent might be given the type biological parent while the other parent might be given the type step parent. However, RM doesn’t do very much with these parent types. If I remember correctly they do show up in Family Group Sheets, but they don’t show up in narrative reports. And you can’t search for them or make groups for them or use any of those kinds of data management tools on RM’s parent type data.
Even more than just the parent types not printing in reports, multiple sets of parents are not reflected in things like narrative reports or pedigree reports at all. Rather, the reports only reflect one set of parents. Again, the only reports that I can think of in RM that can show all sets of parents are Family Group Sheets. But they are not set up to reflect the multiple sets of a parents for a particular individual. Instead, you would need to create a Family Group Sheet for each set of parents.
RM does support an Adoption fact. Since it is an actual fact, it does show up in narrative reports. But many complicated family situations do not involve formal adoptions. For example, my father’s mother died shortly after he was born. He was therefore raised for about three years by an aunt and uncle who served as foster parents. At that point, my grandfather remarried and my father was raised thereafter by his biological father and his new stepmother. There was never an adoption in this scenario, so there is no adoption fact. They only way I have ever found to document these situations so that they show up in reports is with notes.
Just to be clear what I’m saying, in this scenario my grandfather shows up twice as my father’s father - once with his first wife who was my father’s biological mother and again with his second wife who was my father’s stepmother. Those kinds of situations are very common in my experience.
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Thanks Jerry, that’s useful. Thankfully my half-sisters adoption isn’t complicated within the family, but certainly took her down a very different path to me. I’ve added the second set of parents and used the adoption fact as a starting point. Regards, Nick.