It isn’t a spousal/partnership relationship since the family object in RM doesn’t
have a lifespan, i.e. there is no start and end date.
The family is also not affected by divorce facts.
I’m familiar with the Family table in the RM schema, so I already understand how its implemented.
I am more interested in the design concepts. It’s most likely that this wasn’t designed at all,
but just follows from the GEDCOM requirements.
I’m a little annoyed at the “Father” & “Mother” labels, given that there are plenty of other variations, some in my own family. But, yeah, I get that probably comes from the HUSB and WIFE from GEDCOM.
I would say it was designed to follow the GEDCOM model. We don’t get to see the database structures of many other family tree applications but I would guess there are many parallels when it comes to family. Heredis 2023 has a table called Unions whose basic function is the pairing of couples just as RM’s FamilyTable does.
Otoh, its Individus table (akin to RM’s PersonTable) also includes direct references to the mother and father as well as to the Union. It’s in many ways a combination of RM’s PersonTable, ChildTable, FamilyTable and NameTable.
My interest is in the fact that while the biological connection (2 parents and child) is always valid, the married/partner whatever… state can be transitory, certainly dissolved after death.
I guess one would have to say that the state of the union of a couple has to be inferred from their joint events, “joint” being family-type such as Marriage, Residence (fam), Separation, Divorce and from “individual” events, especially Death. One can also set a range-type date for a family-type event, e.g., Marriage could be “from Date1 to Date2”.
Hmmm, I think that’s a matter of personal perspective. Personally I view a marriage that continues to death becoming an eternal thing. For example, when my grandfather passed away leaving my grandmother behind, they were still two souls united. And when she passed too, they were still united, just not in an earthly sense.
I’m thinking about alternate genealogy design fundamentals.
Perhaps the current family/child structure would be reserved solely for biological relationships while all social relationships might be accomplished with something like the RM association.
Then the question would be how to present that.
I’m just thinking forward to the brave, new world of gene editing, designer babies, etc. etc.
Nothing to do with how we do genealogy/family history today.
I’m in agreement that GEDCOM is the chief driver. That makes it very difficult to change.
On the other hand, I think it very much needs to change because the model does not provide an adequate attachment point for relationships like spouse of, parent of, and child of. That in turn is because the relationships are not events.
It seems if an unmarried woman has an illegitimate child by an unknown (in RM) father the label ‘Husband’ could be changed to ‘Father’ or ‘Partner’ instead.That’s great, but why does the Spouse row in the Edit Person screen continue to use the word ‘Spouse’? Surely this should show the changed label too.