In the Family View, it would be nice if you could hide the “+ Add Spouse” block for child that you know never married. Often you know that a child died before they were old enough to marry, or as an adult they never married, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to hide the “+ Add Spouse” box.
When looking at this view, it’s bit like someone shouting don’t look up!
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I agree Nigel. Good idea.
Good idea, but if you look at your people who weren’t married, it is probably a low percentage and you’d spend more time clicking to + Spouse.
Thanks, @Mad Dog. I don’t think this would create extra clicking when adding spouses, because it would be entirely optional. The “+ Add Spouse” block would remain the default unless the user deliberately right-clicked it and selected something like “Known never married.”
This is probably more common in historical family trees than it first appears. Once you go back a few generations, infant and child mortality was very high. It is not unusual to find families that lost two or three children before they were old enough to marry. There are also adults for whom the evidence establishes that they never married.
More importantly, “+ Add Spouse” can mean two different things: either the spouse has not yet been found, or the person is known never to have married. At present, Family View makes both cases look like unfinished research. Allowing the user to mark the second case would make the page look tidier and more complete, while also recording a useful research conclusion.
A right-click option could hide the block or replace it with a discreet “Never married” indicator. Right-clicking again could restore “+ Add Spouse” if new evidence later came to light. That would not inconvenience anyone who prefers the current display.
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Nigel, your right-click suggestion is a great idea. I have a family tree littered with Victorian maiden aunts. I’m sure that’s pretty common, certainly here in the UK.
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The add spouse block could be hidden if the person has a “never married” type fact attached.
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First you wanted to hide it and now you want it to be the default.
In any case it won’t get changed.
“…for child that YOU KNOW never married. Often YOU KNOW that a child died before they were old enough to…”
If YOU KNOW … then YOU KNOW!
Using this logic, the + Add Child would also merit such an option.
Since it makes for more work by users and up to now has been a premise without much warrant, it seems likely to be a rarely-used feature, whose return on investment for the programmers might be questionable.
There’s no harm in asking for consideration of such feature requests, in my view. Looking at the Family tab View screen, I could imagine other users might not like seeing the labels Father:, Mother:, Father’s Parents:, Mother’s Parents:? Should they get an option to hide those labels? Or maybe it just falls under the ROI umbrella. And conversely, why isn’t there a Spouses: label, LOL !
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Something like this.
Exactly.
The default would still be to display “+ Add Spouse” — just as it does now.
The only new options would be to either:
- remove the “+ Add Spouse” box, or
- replace it with a box that says “Never Married”.
So, to be clear, nothing changes by default unless the user chooses one of those options for a particular person.
Hopefully the mock-up above makes the distinction a little easier to see.
The issue for me is that the Family View ends up littered with “+ Add Spouse” boxes that are never going to be clicked.
As it stands, when I look down a family I have to mentally work out why each person has no spouse shown. Did they die as an infant? Did they live to adulthood and never marry? Or have I simply not researched them properly yet?
If I could remove “+ Add Spouse” for somebody I know never married, I’d never need to ask myself that question again. The remaining “+ Add Spouse” boxes would actually mean something — they would identify people where a spouse may still need researching.
And I don’t really see the “more work for users” argument. It’s entirely optional. If you don’t want to use it, you do absolutely nothing and RootsMagic behaves exactly as it does now.
I have around 3,000 people in my tree. I certainly can’t remember which ones married, which ones didn’t, and which ones still need research. That’s precisely why having the software visually distinguish those cases would be useful.
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The users to which I referred are You, not non-users (of the feature). Not only is your workload genealogical, it becomes configurational. It’s only a UI thing, but it’s one more task to accomplish (or accidently overlook). And you gotta scan for (X) number of folks amongst 5K/20K/50K/100k database people and/or remember to always do it, because if You skip/overlook some… the new “meaning” assigned/assumed for those + Add Spouse (still showing) “foils” some truths. I know the alternative would be “work as you go”, but…
I see what you mean, but on a per-person basis, right-clicking and hiding the box would take next to no time compared with finding and checking even a single piece of evidence, such as a birth record.
I also wouldn’t expect anyone to go through thousands of people just to set this. It would be something you do as you come across a person and the evidence supports it.
The benefit is that, once you’ve done it, you never have to wonder later whether there’s no spouse because you haven’t researched them yet, or because you already concluded there wasn’t one.
Well, above, the premise was/is that YOU KNOW (short life span, institutionalized, direct family knowledge of circumstance or attributable source, etc.) and there’s minimal additional effort to expend.
In this statement, though, presumably YOU DON’T KNOW (if you’re having to check/find)… so, delayed accomplishment (of hiding the ADD) …until after a little more effort. Again though, only for a cumulative (work as you go) GUI change… for confirmation signal/inference.
In a parallel request, someone else (others) might request that the Edit Person window have options to hide all Fact Types (from the dropdown list) that they KNOW don’t apply to a particular Person -and- RM should keep track of such for everybody in the database (but only as an “option”).
Since it’s the GUI being altered, it’s not really tangible data (maybe not even metadata?) but, beyond that… it’s likely restricted to only this database being “visually” presented to this user and likely difficult to make portable. If record id’s change or exchange between other genealogical programs or services is desired… lost work seems possible.
Just saying, there’s lots of ramifications. It becomes one more thing the programmers have to test every time changes to other parts of the program are checked in.
I think we’re now getting rather a long way from the very simple feature request I actually made.
You seem to be assuming that because this changes something visually in the Family View, it would therefore have to be stored as some fragile GUI setting tied to a record ID. I’m not sure why that assumption follows.
“Never Married” could just as easily be stored as persistent information about the person — a fact, flag, attribute or whatever mechanism the RootsMagic developers considered appropriate — with the Family View simply displaying that information differently.
So perhaps you could clarify the technical basis for your concerns:
Why would this necessarily have to be stored as a GUI preference rather than person-level data?
Why would it necessarily become invalid if record IDs changed?
And why is the fact that a new feature would require programming and testing being presented as an argument against it? Surely that is true of every feature ever added to RootsMagic.
If these are limitations you know exist in the RootsMagic architecture, then fair enough — I’d be interested to understand them. If they are assumptions about how the developers might implement the feature, then I think we’re inventing technical problems before the developers have even considered the suggestion.
My request remains very simple.
By default, RootsMagic continues to show “+ Add Spouse” exactly as it does now.
If I have established that a particular person never married, I would like the option either to hide that prompt or replace it with “Never Married”.
That gives me a permanent visual reminder of research I have already completed. With around 3,000 people in my tree, that is considerably more useful to me than relying on my memory years later.
Anyone who doesn’t want to use it does nothing at all.
I’m really not sure it requires quite the architectural crisis you seem to be anticipating.
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Nigel, as I see it this whole thing is about creating a visual flag so you can easily identify people on the main People screen who won’t have a spouse - either because they died too young or because they never married in later life.
Having read the other comments posted here I can see the difficulties of your suggested solution, although I still understand why you want to do this.
As an alternative approach, how about using a pre-assigned icon as the Primary Photo for those people who you want to draw attention to? I use these two png images to signify ‘Died Young’ which I use for anyone who died under the age of 11, and ‘Never Married’ for those who remained single throughout their adult lives.
I think this method should give you the immediate visual clue you’re looking for. Also, if you check the tags for these icons in the Media Gallery you can see a list of all the people you have used them on - which is handy.
The downside is that you can’t also show any real photo you may have for that person (although those can still be included into the person’s Scrapbook of course).
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I think “Spouse” in RM means a person who is linked to another person to create a Family. There is no requirement for the two spouses to have a Marriage Fact. Thus, two unmarried people can be linked as “Spouses”.
DNA matching, domestic partners, in vitro fertilization, adoptions, and discovery of the names of birth parents makes assignment of two people as “Spouses” in RM far wider than just whether the two people are considered married spouses via a civil or religious ceremony.
Please correct me if the above is a misunderstanding of what “Spouse” means in RM.
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Thanks Steve, yes that may help as a work around. It would be nice if it was a properly implemented feature though.
Up front, I’ll say that trying to explain, in depth, the technical aspects wouldn’t be fruitful.
My prior babbling was, more so, aimed at expressing that there is a bigger picture surrounding how the programmers must consider one tiny change in both the design(s) of a.) how to store data -and- b.) how to display that data.
The program’s greater goals are to be compatible with the standards and interchange of its other competitor programs and services. Secondarily comes the features that set it apart from those others, while still being useful to the advancement of the greater genealogical ecosystem. The third consideration is the Graphical User Interface and it is dependent upon a pre-conceived, designed layout, constructed with various program controls that all have to interact together.
Your request, in and of itself, seems simple. Just let you mark people (you’re gonna need their Record ID) then either store that list of Record ID’s somewhere separate for reference -or- make provisions within each person’s current record to add a little ditty that says don’t display this option for those people.
The overhead is that, now, that is one more thing RM must monitor and keep track of, as you navigate Views and family trees. Thing is, it’s already doing 19/29/49 other things , at all times, already. So, the programmer then has to look through those XX other things that its running and figure out where to slot it into the sequence so that it paints the correct thing on the screen at the right time (not before this… where it would be too early and perhaps get written over by some other display element -or- after that… where it would be too late to have read the Record ID it needs from its column in a table somewhere, etc.).
This kind of request is more optional and less necessary than an actual “fix” and then faces the additional consideration of its overall efficacy in benefit to the larger group that is the body of users, but typically only after all bugfixes and feature completions workflow. Most user requests never see the light of day. Some turn up down the road, usually as part of a greater revision to the style or design. The meantime suggestions and workarounds are often helpful enough to assuage some issues, but this wouldn’t be the first time a visual onscreen display change didn’t get implemented. I’m out, cheers ≡÷þ
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@dec, yes, that’s a fair point.
I used “Never Married” because that’s the situation I had in mind, but I take your point that RootsMagic can use “Spouse” for an unmarried partner as well.
So maybe the wording needs a bit of thought.
The main thing I’m after is simply a way to mark that I’ve already established there is no spouse or partner to add, so the Family View doesn’t keep showing “+ Add Spouse” forever.
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There’s already a right click option. The ugly gray boxes are totally unnecessary.
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