I’m giving RM 10 a whirl. Imported my .gedcom from MacFamilyTree 11. My mom’s mother remarried, and her 2nd husband adopted my mom. I have both parents listed, and figured out how to select the birth father, and mark the 2nd as adoptive father.
But my mom is still showing the error parents married after person’s birth, even though her birth parents marriage is 4 years prior to her birth. Adopted at age 6.
How do I correct this?
The simple way is to click not a problem in the problem list. The other thing that springs to mind is whether the spouses are shown in the correct order. Highlight the person and click on spouses in the side bar. You can rearrange from there if necessary. Looks like:-
There is really nothing to correct. Rather, mark the problem as “Not a Problem”. Do so by clicking on the red problem icon and then by clicking on the “Not a Problem” box.
RM’s tool to display Problem Alerts is really intended mostly to detect typos in your data entry. But the tool can easily be fooled into declaring problems when none exist. I have a great grandmother who was married when she was 12 years old. Really! And I knew this long before I started doing genealogy. RM flagged it. I knew there was not a problem. So I told RM it was not a problem. The alert has gone away ever since.
The tool can be turned off completely, but I would not recommend doing so. I think the tool is too useful in helping to detect typos just to turn it off completely.
I haven’t tested, but I’m doubtful that rearranging the spouses would have any effect on RM’s false detection of this problem. The logic is surely that person’s A and B were the parent of person C. Person C was born before person A and person B were married. The fact that one or both of the parents might have been adoptive parents is not taken into consideration.
And again I haven’t tested, but I suspect RM might flag a problem in the following situation. Person A and person B marry and become the parent of person C two years later. Five years later, person A and person B divorce. Three years after that, person A and person B remarry. So they were married after the birth of their child person C. I don’t know if RM flags this situation or not, but if it does, just mark it as Not A Problem.
Okay thanks all. Since my settings are correct and spouse in proper order, I just clicked “Not a problem”.
if you go in and mark the 1st marriage as PRIMARY-- it will solve the problem
Thank you, I’ll try that.
I cannot reproduce this behavior. Here is my test case.
John Doe and Jane Smith were married in 1870. Elizabeth Doe was born in 1872, so there is not a problem there. Elizabeth Doe is marked as the birth daughter of both John Doe and Jane Smith.
John Doe and Mary Smith were married in 1875 (presumably Jane had died). I added Elizabeth Doe as the daughter of John and Mary, birth daughter of John and step daughter of Mary. That created a problem alert because Elizabeth was born before the marriage of John and Mary.
I then marked the marriage of John and Jane as primary. It had no effect on the problem alert. The screen captures with the problem alert are after I marked the marriage John and Jane as primary.
@thejerrybryan --Sorry Jerry to be so slow..
And YES you are CORRECT-- it does NOT seem to work-- I had originally suggested it on this problem where a hubby and wife were married, divorced and remarried ..
It worked in this situation, so I THOUGHT it would work in all situations-- Apologize to all for not checking it out before hand BUT would like to know WHY it does NOT work—and why when you have a child attached to his birth parents and step parent that RM defaults to the 2nd marriage as the PRIMARY-- technically in the problem search it does say born before PARENT’S marriage NOT PARENTS marriage–so technically it is correct-- the child was born before his father/mother married a 2nd time…
RootsMagic 10 help says
I.Primary – Check this box if you have more than one of this fact type for a person, and want this one to be the primary one. For example, if you have 2 conflicting birth facts entered for a person, you can check this box for the one you want to be printed on pedigree charts, etc.
pedigree charts, etc is kind of vague --what I found so far was box charts fan charts etc–not narrative etc..
Guess my idea of what should happen when primary is checked is different than what does happen–Again Sorry for the mis-information…
The reason it doesn’t work the way it might be expected to work is a little bit subtle. Actually, that’s not true. It’s a lot subtle.
Here is a trivial thought experiment. Do not mark a Birth fact for John Doe as primary. But actually do mark a Birth fact for Sam Smith as primary. Would you expect Sam Smith’s Birth fact to become primary for John Doe? Obviously not, but why not? Because John Doe and Sam Smith are not the same person.
Marriage facts work the same way, except that a Marriage fact is for a family instead of for a person. And a family is not the same thing as “two people” or as “two spouses who are married to each other”. Instead, a family in RM is its own thing, different from a a person and different from two people. And it’s not just RM that makes this very subtle distinction. It’s also GEDCOM that makes this very subtle distinction. And because of needing to be compatible with GEDCOM, much but surely not all genealogy software in the world makes this very subtle distinction.
So suppose you enter a Marriage fact for John Doe and Jane Smith. In the Edit Person screen for John Doe, there is a Marriage fact that looks like it’s for John Doe, just like there is a Birth fact John Doe and a Death fact for John Doe. But the Marriage fact is not for John Doe. And in the Edit Person screen for Jane Smith, there is a Marriage fact that looks like it’s for Jane Smith, just like there is a Birth fact for Jane Smith and a Death fact is for Jane Smith. But the Marriage fact is not for Jane Doe.
So if the Marriage fact is not for John Doe and if it is not for Jane Smith, then just who is it for? It’s for the family of John Doe and Jane Smith. That’s a totally different thing than the Marriage fact being for John Smith and the Marriage fact being for Jane Doe.
With that as a background, let’s take two cases. In the first case, John Doe and Jane Smith marry, they divorce, and they marry a second time. The family of John Doe and Jane Smith now has two marriage facts. In other words, the two Marriage facts are for the same family. It therefore makes perfect sense to be able to mark one or the other of the marriage facts as the primary. And that’s why marking the first of the marriages as primary suppresses the Problem alert for the children being born before the marriage.
In the second case, John Doe and Jane Smith marry and Jane dies. The family of John Doe and Jane Smith only has one marriage fact. Then John Doe and Mary Smith marry. The family of John Doe and Mary Smith only has one marriage fact.
We are getting into the territory of beating dead horses, but I want to drive the point home. In this last example, John Doe married first Jane Smith and married second Mary Smith. Appropriate marriage facts were entered for both marriages. Under these circumstances, here are some questions and answers about John, Jane, and Mary.
With all of that as background, it makes no sense for either of the two Marriage facts you see on John Doe’s Edit Person screen to be marked as primary. Neither of the two Marriage facts you see are really for John Doe. Rather, one of them for the family of John Doe and Jane Smith and the other of them is for the family of John Doe and Mary Smith. And these are not the same two families.
