My father-in-law was not married to my mother-in-law (but he was married at the time). How do I enter that?
By not adding a marriage (ie. right-click your spouse, then add link that FIL is father of your spouse and MIL as mother of your spouse) using Add Parents OR individually add mother and father .
As a general rule, you can expect RM to use the term “spouse” for a couple, whether the couple was ever married or not. This can sometimes be a little disconcerting because in common usage the term “spouse” most typically implies a marriage.
The most common way to enter non-married couples is simply to omit their marriage fact, since there wasn’t a marriage. That begs the question of how to enter a couple who likely were married but for whom you don’t have any actually marriage record. I also have a user defined fact called Partners that I sometimes use for non-married partners when I know for certain that they were not married.
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OK. I’m fairly certain men having kids out of wedlock is fairly common. I know he and his wife never had any children. Since she isn’t related to my wife, not really interested in tracking her lineage. I’ll just leave my wife’s mother listed as his spouse. Thanks!
There are suggestions to just omit a Marriage fact from a person who is in a relationship but is not married. That’s right as far as it goes, but then where do the source citations for that relationship go?
One could attach them to the “family” line or one could enter a fact that describes the relationship (in whatever discrete way you’d like). The fact method will provide a place for a date, location and a place to attach sources.
Does anyone attach citations to the family?
Never.
I use my Partner fact as the attachment point for sources for the couple when there is no Marriage fact.
In my view, there are several problems with attaching sources to the family. And for that matter, I also don’t like family notes or family media. But let’s focus on family sources.
Problem #1 is that there is no fact to which family sources can be linked in narrative reports. In other words, there is no place for the citation superscript for a family to go. The citation superscript sort of just floats around somewhere in the text of a narrative report, not really attached to anything because there is nothing to attach it to.
Problem #2 is that family stuff manifests itself in the Spouse line in RM’s Edit Person Screen for the family in which a person is a spouse and in the Parents line in RM’s Edit Person screen for the family in which a person is a child. Let’s take a real example for the case where a person is a child.
My paternal grandfather had a sister named Edna Bryan who was born in 1908 and who had an official state of Tennessee birth certificate. So my initial attempt to attach a citation for Edna’s birth certificate to show her parents was to attach it to the Parents line in her Edit Person screen. But when ran a narrative report for Edna, the BIrth Certificate was not there as evidence for her parents. And when I ran a narrative report for the family of Edna’s parents, the citation for her birth certificate was just floating around in the narrative report in couple facts for Edna’s parents, not really attached to anything as I already described above.
But that’s not the worst of it. My paternal grandfather had another sister named Willie Bryan who was born in 1910 and who had an official state of Tennessee Birth Certificate. When I opened up Willie’s Edit Person screen to try to enter her birth certificate as a source for her parents, her Parents line already had the citation for Edna’s birth certificate. Say what? But that’s the way this “family” stuff works.
My solution is surely pretty non-standard, but here is what I do.
- I have my Partners fact for couples for whom I don’t have a Marriage fact. The Partners fact serves as the attachment point for citations about the couple. The citation superscripts have a specific attachment point in narrative reports and do not simply float around in midair.
- I have a Parents fact for children that has the same date as their birth date and which has a sort date just after their Birth fact. The Parents fact serves as the attachment point for citations about the child’s parents. The Parents fact lists the names of the parents in the Description field.
- I also share the Parents fact with each of the parents. That allows me to use the parents’ actual names in narrative reports using role variables in the Parents fact rather than the names from the Description field, and allows for the actual names of the parents to be included in the Name Index for that page of a narrative report whereas text from the Description field is not included in the Name Index. And by the way, I share the Parents fact with the parents one at a time, father first, because I always want to list the parents in the same order - father then mother. If I share the Parents fact with both parents at the same time, sometimes the father is listed first and sometimes the mother is listed first.
- I also create a role sentence for the shared role so that the births of their children show up as life events in the timelines for the parents. It seems to me that the birth of a child is a significant event in the life of a parents that merits having its own listing in a person’s timeline.
I realize how convoluted that must seem, and it probably actually is just as convoluted as it seems. But it works really well for me.
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Not too convoluted.
I’m just a bit surprised that you use the fact sharing mechanism.
It all has to do with improving the appearance of printed reports for family reunions. In addition to sharing the Parents fact with a Birth_of_Child role, I also share the Marriage fact with an Individual_Marriage role to get the Marriage event to show up in the timeline of individual facts for each spouse.
Those are the only two uses I make of sharing roles. In general I don’t use RM’s shared roles, especially not for the obvious things like census, because RM’s shared roles are often lost when data is transferred to genealogy software other than RM itself. But in the two special cases where I do actually use shared roles, no actual data or information is lost if my RM data is shared to genealogy software other than RM. The data is all still there. All that’s lost is an enhancement to the way I produce printed reports for family reunions.
Thank you for this suggestion, I don’t like the default assumption that if there is no marriage fact then the couple wasn’t married, as in my database it usually means I just haven’t found the marriage yet! So I was originally wanting to use the “family notes”, which I still have been unable to locate, to indicate that a couple never married but lived together as if they were, I think your Partner fact option is much cleaner.
It’s not altogether obvious where the family note is located.
As far as the Edit Person screen, you will find the family note by clicking on the note icon in the Spouse line in the top half of the Edit Person line. Again, this “Spouse” may only be a partner and not actually a spouse. Curiously, you can see the exact same note in the Parents line at the top half of the Edit Person screen for any of the couple’s children, even though the note is not really for the children.
As far as narrative reports, the family note will appear in the section of the report which has the timeline for the couple - things like the Marriage fact and Divorce fact and the list of children. It will not appear in the individual timeline for any of either of the parents along with their individual facts like Birth and Death.
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