I have a female with a child, but she did not marry the father. Nor do I know who the father is. does rm only allow for unknown spouse? Because this would not be correct. The child shares the surname of the mother.
I don’t understand the question or, rather, the problem. A child can be linked to a parent couple, one of which is unknown (Record Number =0). A parent couple is a “family”, even without children. Each member of the couple is a “spouse” whether or not there is a “marriage” fact for the “family”. There are optional labels for “spouse”, e.g., “partner”. And for the Child-Parent relationship (birth, adopted, foster…). À child can be linked to multiple parent couples.
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That’s what I’m looking for… an optional label for the father. All I see is spouse, no partner or otherwise. Can I unlink this spouse? Does the child remain with her?
The biggest problem with “spouse” as used by RootsMagic is that it does not follow the dictionary and common definition of spouse. Every dictionary I could find online defines the word as a married person in relation to the other person in the marriage. If some dictionary may give an alternate usage, it is not the first definition. Since RM creates an unknown “spouse” when a child is added to a person, RM should seriously consider using a different term for the unknown person. Partner or mate seem to be the best alternatives. It would also end a lot of the questions that frequently occur concerning the usage of “spouse”.
Okay so I can’t change it. Thanks. Yep should definitely have a drop down list to choose options.
In the Help page Editing a person, scroll down to Edit Person Pane to find the controls for spouse labels and child-parent characterisations. These may not satisfy you because the implementation is superficial.
If you unlink the child from the Unknown-Steinmetz couple, that couple should disappear. You could then link the child to the Winter-Steinmetz couple and set the child-father relationship to Step; the child-mother rel defaults to assumed birth or can be set to asserted “Birth”. I forget whether the child’s pedigree will include the step-parent’s Ancestry.
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Thanks, but there is no actual person to edit. In family view, it’s just the child and mother, and in the person section on the right, selecting the spouse, then edit does nothing.
Also, the child died before the mother married John Winter, so there’s no step relation either.
Ok, well “spouse” on the user interface is the only place where you will see it. Don’t sweat it.
Alternatively, unlink the child. Add a dummy spouse to Steinmetz, named and labeled as you see fit, add the child to this family.
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The “spouse” labels don’t actually do anything (well, except perhaps to annoy the RM user as they are looking at at non-spouse on the screen being called a spouse).
The labels don’t appear in any reports. You can’t search based on the labels or color code based on the labels or make groups based on the labels or anything like that. And even in the situations where you can provide an alternative label or relationship, the label or relationship still doesn’t actually do anything. So you just have to learn to ignore the labels.
It seems to me that this misuse of the term “spouse” is deeply ingrained in the underlying data model that is used by most of genealogy software. For example, GEDCOM has a data structure called a “family” and the parents in this structure are referred to via the FAMS tag (the Family Spouse tag), even though the parent may not be a spouse and even though a parent may be a single parent.
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Okay, thanks guys. I’ll just ignore it 
This can be confusing for when people first encounter. it is related to the Family table.
If the person is know it has their RM ID – if not it usually has person 0.
(such as unknown father)
Kevin
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