“Partner” is fine, in most cases, and we have that label already in RMG. However, the label is almost entirely cosmetic; is shows only in the Family Group Sheet (it would help were it to also show in the Individual Summary).
Question: The Father/Mother labels can be set to Father/Husband/Other, and Mother/Wife/Other. The Default is Father and Mother. In what situations would we change “Father” and “Mother” to “Husband” and “Wife”? Are husband and wife a married couple who had no children?
A database of marriages in a particular locale?
Mother and Husband etc would be used for a step father — such as your Mom remarries when she is 72 and you are 50-- he MIGHT be a really nice guy and maybe even a life long family friend BUT you MIGHT not think of him the same as her previous husband ( your step dad who had been in your life and raised you since age 5)…
Here’s a parental-marriage relationship I could use some suggestions for categorizing in RM:
Male store manager has an affair and a resulting child with a woman employee, who was married to another man. The laws of the state made that man the legal father of all children born to the mother in the married couple.
The child, while growing up, suspected her “father” raising her was not her bio father, and only discovered and then confirmed her bio father’s real identity at her age 50 via DNA testing of herself and her cousins and half-siblings.
A database of marriages in a particular locale?
I do not know what you mean by that. I looked up parental labels in RMG “Help”, and it only lists said labels, with no explanation of when or for what they should be used.
Not change, but moreso only need. If I’m a researcher, recording all the marriages that took place in a particular state/county/town/church or whatever… I am only going to require using the labels Husband/Wife.
In your scenario, I would list her as child of her mother’s marriage, as her legal father was the man she thought of as such as she grew up; I would add her biological father with her mother as a second set of parents with an explanatory note.
This is why I started this thread, as her bio father was never a spouse to her mother, nor even a partner; as my aforementioned distant cousin called her biological father, he was nothing more than the sperm donor. I feel that as genealogists, we could come up with a different term than simply lumping couple who who had children but did not marry not even live together as “spouses”.
I have a number of half-siblings (my mother married three times and had children by each husband), and I count them as children of each respective couple. The exception is my sister, who was adopted and raised by my father, and never met her biological father.
I list her with two sets of parents (as RMG allows), our mother and her biological father, and our mother and the dad who raised her (and is her legal father).
Legally, since her adoption was completed before my birth, she and I are full siblings, according to the law.
Work at it long enough, and you’ll find all sorts of unusual relationships. On the topic of convoluted relationships, one set of great-great grandparents in my line married after each had been previously married and had families with said previous spouses. My great-great grandfather had daughters who were almost as old as my great-great grandmother’s youngest brothers; two of his daughters married two of her brothers. The two men were simultaneously my great-great grandfather’s sons-in-law AND his brothers-in-law, while their wives were my great-great grandmother’s step-daughters AND sisters-in-law. I don’t have to worry about any labels here, but it sometimes hurts my head to explain it.
I also have seventh-great grandparents who were step-siblings to each other; his father and her mother remarried when he was 19 and she 14, and they married when he was 24 and she 19. Again, no labels needed, just a note of the unusual nature of the events.
But the truth is that we don’t know what RMG intended with these labels, because it has not been explained, or at least not somewhere where we can find said explanation.
Yours is a suggestion of how it MIGHT be put to use, but we really don’t know what its actual and/or original intent was. I could create a group to fulfill that need more easily than creating a label (I can create multiple groups to filter these kinds of needs (indeed, I have done so); your suggestion seems only good for one group at a time.
Well, it’s only intent was for You the User to have choices for viewing within the program. They did not have to offer them. It could have been hard-wired wording of their choosing, period. I don’t believe that those labels are transferred out of the program or printed in reports or even used by any other program or service. It’s basically what’s called Metadata - Wikipedia and I definitely change Father/Mother to Husband/Wife for childless couples.
I am not certain as to what country you are researching however in the United States they are not ever full siblings in a legal context. From within the family, sure, they may be viewed as such but not from a legal standpoint.
You have produced and continue to produce numerous edge cases that many people do not have in order to further your complaint about labels. Several reasonable explanations have been put forth which you chose to continue to argue over. You are trying to argue for something that no other genealogy program supports and you seem to think that RM should conform to your edge cases.
I have seen no word from RMG as to the intent of these labels, and unless you are officially speaking on their behalf, then I am still wondering, and seeking an answer.
Since we are all paying to use the product (I’ve been using the product since it was Family Origins, running in DOS, and I had no internet), and RMG has a reputation for paying attention to its customers’ needs and suggestions, I feel that an answer like “they put this in when they didn’t have to, and we should be satisfied with that” is just a bit inadequate.
I did not ask for such data to be transferable, just usable in reports and searchable within the database, and perhaps allow me to know the actual numbers of spouses that people have without having to do the math myself and correct reports.
When I began this thread, I did not realize that I was the only one seeing a problem, or at least caring that there was any problem. If that’s so, we can stop the discussion now.
But before doing so, I brought this topic up a year or two ago with a couple of colleagues in my local RMG users group (Kansas City, even though I’m now in Ukraine), and one presented a non-hypothetical conundrum, as it occurred in his family: a rape occurs. The underage victim is underage, the rapist is an older relative, and she is required by her parents to carry the child to term, and it is adopted by another relative. Before we dismiss this as “just don’t record these facts”, they ARE already recorded.
They are not looking for a specific term to describe rapist and victim, but they asked if there might be a term to designate “non-spouse”. I still think that having a check box for such a condition (not that dissimilar to the “living” check box") might be a good start.
Please define “edge cases”. Not one, but the the “numerous edge cases” with which I am accused of having “continued”, during my “complaint”.
I am approaching my sixth decade of seriously researching my genealogy, and have run across many unusual situations. I apologize if they are to be considered “edge”.
After my mother’s death, my sister was listed as my father’s daughter (no reference to adoption) in several legal documents in Kansas, same as my brother and me, while our half-brothers were listed as his step-sons. And she is always listed as second child of three, since she was adopted the year after my brother’s birth but before mine. Might not be legal in the U.S., but Kansas courts did not catch it. It had no effect on her legal status, but it happened, so I note it.
I did not bring it up to argue about anything in the database, but merely as a reference for my reply to David Chawes’ question about a relationship he found confusing.