Strange behaviour trying to add parents

[AlanWatson]

Working through my tree I noticed a person whom I had added in Ancestry (from a census record in which his father was not present) with his mother and not his father.

So the mother appears with two spouses, one unknown.

To fix this, I wanted first to add his correct parents, and then unlink him from the family containing his mother alone.

I right-clicked and chose ‘add parents’

Slightly to my surprise, I was first asked whether I wanted to add the spouse to the existing family.

I declined, thinking that I would create a duplicate for the existing family.

Then I was asked whether I wanted to add the spouse to another existing family

Declining, I got the same screen again.

Then I was asked to pick the person’s father.

I picked the right existing person with his correct wife, but was then presented with this option, once again to add a new spouse.

I declined and went round in something of a loop, once again prompting me to add spouses, until this time I got to a screen to add his mother.

I picked the correct mother, with her correct husband and children, but was then asked not to add the parents to the person but to add a marriage event.

In the process, I seem to have gone from a person with a mother and unknown father to one with multiple parents. (The count says three, but it certainly looks like four to me.)

When I unlinked him from the three wrong set of parents, I was left up with this

He has the right parents, but in exactly what I wanted to avoid, a duplicate family - none of his siblings are there. Both his mother and father have the same spouse twice over.

I eventually fixed the problem by adding him as a child to the correct family and unlinking him from the duplicate family and the duplicated spouses from each other.

However, I can’t help thinking that this process for adding parents is fundamentally broken.

[MadDog]

It can happen when a complete family is listed in 1 census but 1 spouse isn’t in subsequent ones the children are the same but an “unknown” parent is added.

Fix the relationships in Ancestry before doing anything in RM.

[thejerrybryan]

@AlanWatson

In the process, I seem to have gone from a person with a mother and unknown father to one with multiple parents.

Despite your very helpful screen captures, I’m having trouble following the exact state of the family relationships before and after you were adding the missing spouse to the family. But it looks like the “person with a mother and unknown father” actually had multiple sets of parents even before you started to add a missing spouse. You can see 3 sets of parents in your second screen capture.

I doubt that I could recommend the best way to clean up the duplicate family links in this situation without having a copy of your database to play with. But the one suggestion I would make would be to display the Life Summary panel in the bottom half of the side panel on the left side of the screen while you are doing this kind of cleanup. The Life Summary panel has three sub-panels - events for the person, spouses and children for the person, and parents and siblings for the person. I find it best to leave the events for the person sub-panel panel collapsed most of the time so I can see the person’s spouses, children, parents, and siblings. Also, the divider bar between the bottom half of the left side panel and the top half can be moved up and down, and I would move it up in this situation.

Actually, I run with RM’s left side panel set that way most of time, not just when I’m cleaning up family relationships. And I realize that the “left size panel” can be a “right side panel” if you prefer. I find it very helpful always to be there (or nearly always). I do use the Index panel in the left side panel occasionally, but mostly I use People List view in the main panel as my index. I find that to be more useful most of the time than the index on the side, even though they both work in exactly the same way.

As to why you had the person with three sets of parents and a missing mother in the first place, there surely was something wrong in the Ancestry tree. In addition, my experiences is that TreeShare sometimes has trouble making family relationships look the same in RM as in Ancestry when a person as multiple spouses with children associated with the wrong spouses and that sort of thing. It seems you have to do the cleanup both places rather than doing the cleanup in one place and then using TreeShare to make the family relationships be the same in the other place.

[rzamor1]

When using Add Parents it basically creates a new family unit. When the child is already linked to one parent it will add another family group unless you add the missing spouse to the one they are in. It’s best to add the child to the correct family group if it already exists. The Life Summary is a good way to add a child to the single parent’s other family group.

[scoobiejon]

So the easiest thing to do is unlink the child from the family with the unknown father and all should be fixed. As you said the child is already connected to the correct parents, so leave that family alone. Why do you want to link a new father?

[kevync1985]

The Life summary was one of the most useful additions. It really help correcting family/spouse/children relations – if not directly form that view it will at least show what needs to be addressed or reviewed. The are a few key things missing (Life span, and or BY/DY/DOB for example) but it was a great improvement

[AlanWatson]

@thejerrybryan

But it looks like the “person with a mother and unknown father” actually had multiple sets of parents even before you started to add a missing spouse. You can see 3 sets of parents in your second screen capture.

The person with a mother and unknown father was only a member of that single family when I started. However, I didn’t take screen shots the first time through. I thought that I ended up where I started and decided to repeat the process taking screenshots. In retrospect it is certainly possible that I had already unknowingly created one or more extra sets of parents the first time through.

[AlanWatson]

@scoobiejon

As you said the child is already connected to the correct parents, so leave that family alone. Why do you want to link a new father?

The person was not already connected to the correct parents when I started. Even when the confusing process had finished, he was connected to a duplicate copy of the original parents’ family. Neither of these situations was correct.

[AlanWatson]

@rzamor1

Add Parents it basically creates a new family unit. When the child is already linked to one parent it will add another family group unless you add the missing spouse to the one they are in.

Thanks @rzamor1, your comment is helpful, although I think it is the wrong way round and that the process you describe does not cover all the things I might want to do. Logically, I think that there are three things that I might want to do

1. Add the missing parent to the child’s existing family. (This is the second thing in your explanation, but it is what the first screen I was offered prompted me to do, although it confused me immediately as I had chosen to add parents and the screen I was offered prompted me to add a spouse.)
2. Create a new family to add the child to (either using two existing people as parents or adding one or more new people in the process)
3. Add the child to an existing family (in fact what I wanted to do and as you imply, I don’t think that I ever got this choice).

This is clearly quite complicated, so I think that the system needs to give the user some clear choices. It completely failed to do this, leaving me utterly confused.

I would be inclined either to give the user the choice of these three options right away. Otherwise the screens presented to the user need to be clearly labelled. The third option certainly needs to be one of the options.

[AlanWatson]

Since people have been confused by my screen prints, and since I may have already complicated things by having had a prior run before producing them, I have started again with a new test database.

This database has four people in two families.

The first family consists of a mother and a child, with no father

The second family consists of a mother (the same person as in the first family), a father and a different child.

The two children only belong to one family each. The mother is shown as having two spouses, one of whom is unknown. The father has one spouse.

As in my real life case, I want to use ‘add parents’ to add the first child to the correct family including her mother, father and brother.

As before, the first screen I am shown confusingly asks me whether I want to add a spouse to the existing family. (I think that this is a valid option, but that the screen should ask me whether I want to add the missing parent to the family to avoid confusion.)

If I choose to do this and add the existing father, then I end up with duplicate families, each with the same parents but different children. I chose not to do it.

I am then prompted to add a father

I chose to select an existing person, the existing father

I expected then to be asked to confirm that I wished to add the child to the existing family. Instead I was asked to add a spouse to it.

I think that the only thing wrong with this screen is its title. If I choose yes, then I end up with what I had expected

The first child then has two sets of parents, her correct parents and a duplicate family with only her mother. (I would obviously unlink her from there.)

The first time through, confused by being asked to add a spouse to an existing family, I chose ‘no’. If I do that (having undone all the previous stuff - you will have to trust me, but I really have undone it all) then I am presented with the option to add the mother

I chose the existing mother

and was then asked to add a marriage event

And chose not to.

I was then left with the original four people and three families

The first child was a member of her original mother-only family, and a new family consisting of herself, her mother and her father.

The second child was a member of his original family with his mother and father but not his sister

The father had two spouses, both his actual spouse. The mother had three, her real spouse twice and one unknown.

So in summary, the main (perhaps the only) thing wrong is the labelling on the screens.

• The first screen I was presented with asked me to add a spouse whereas it should have asked me to add a parent.
• Having declined that option and picked a parent, I was prompted to add a spouse to an existing family when I should have been prompted to add a child.
• When I declined to add a spouse, my subsequent options created a new family.

I should stress that I am not trying to cause trouble. As an experienced user, I was genuinely baffled. I think it is important for RM to clarify the titles and descriptions on the screens.

I think that my previous go, I must have created a duplicate family the first time around and that this must have caused further complications when I repeated the operation to create the screen prints.

[thejerrybryan]

Thank you for your new screen shots. However, I confess I have not yet, gone through them in detail along with your comments. Rather, I’m going to address your concerns a different way.

It seems to me that you are the victim of a very strange aspect of the data model that RM uses to connect people to families in the possible role of a father or a mother or a child. And it’s not just you that is the victim of this “strange aspect”. It’s all RM users. And it’s not just RM users, it’s users of pretty much all genealogy software in the world because nearly all genealogy software uses this same data model. I can’t swear it’s 100% of all genealogy software in the world. But it has to be close to 100% because GEDCOM uses the data model with this “strange aspect” and nearly all genealogy software has to interact with GEDCOM at some point or other.

The “strange aspect” of this data model is that it does not support people being in a parent-child relationship with each other. Indeed, it doesn’t even support people being in a spouse to spouse relationship to each other. I’m sure that many of you all will have an immediate reaction in the vein of “surely you jest” or “surely you are wrong” because what I’m saying sounds so impossible. But I jest not, and I’m not wrong.

What the data model actually does support is families. A person can be in a family as a spouse. A person can be in a family as a child. That’s the only options there are. “Parent” is not an option. One can logically conclude that if one person is in the family as a spouse and another person is in the family as a child that that two people are in a parent-child relationship to each other. That’s a logical conclusion and that’s the way human beings think about it. And software such as RM typically paper over the distinction and make it look like there is a parent-child relationship when no such relationship actually exists in the data model.

I’m sure most of you are thinking that this is a distinction without a difference and that I am making waves for no good reason. And that’s true most of the time in RM. The issue arises primarily when there people linked to families incorrectly, as you have in your example. RM tries to present the data to you the way human beings think about it rather than the way the data model really works. As a result, it can be painfully difficult to get people unlinked from the families where they don’t belong and then linked to the families where they do belong. Most of the time, things go smoothly enough that the incorrect linking doesn’t happen in the first place. But when the incorrect linking does happen, it can be tricky to fix.

WIth all that in mind, here is how I would fix your problem, starting from the get go.

1. Highlight first child #4. Do an Add Parents. This is where RM is trying to paper over the difference between the data model and the way human beings think about it. What really needs to happen is that first child #4 needs to be linked to the same family where Mother #1 and Father #5 are in the two spouse positions. But in the RM user interface, choose the Existing option for the parents, and choose the family with Mother #1 and Father #5. At this point first child #4 has two sets of parents. One set is Mother #1 and blank (or Unknown spouse, but it’s really blank). The other set is Mother #1 and Father #4. Also at this point, the family with Mother #1 and Father #5 now has two chldren, which is the desired outcome.
2. Display first child #4 in the family with Mother #1 and blank. Using Life Summary as a navigation tool can help with this. Highlight first child #4. The child may already be highlighted, but be sure the child is highlighted. Do an Unlink from parents and unlink first child #4 from the family with Mother #1 and blank.

At this point, you will be done because this is a very simple case. In more complicated cases, there can be more than two children to clean up and more than two families to deal with. In this case, the reason you are done is that removing an only child from a one parent family causes the family itself to cease to exist. And I would continue to emphasize that I’m not talking about how human beings think about it in the real world. I’m talking about how the data model works. A family cannot exist in this data model with only a single person. To exist, a family has to have at least one spouse and one child, or else it has to have two spouses. A two spouse family can have zero or more children, but a one spouse family has to have one or more children. So our step #2 has removed an only chlld from a one spouse family, causing the family to cease to exist, which is our desired outcome.

[AlanWatson]

I understand about the data model, and I think that this may partly explain the title of the first screen I was presented with, but it cannot possibly be the explanation for the title of the screen that confused me most.

RM did in fact present me with the three options that it should have, and in a fairly logical order although it could have signposted what it was going to do more clearly.

1. It first asked me to complete the family group that the child was already in; the screen asked me to add a spouse whereas I think that it should have asked me to add a parent. Perhaps the missing person is called a spouse in the data model (they are called father and mother on our screens) but since I had called an option to add parents, I think it would have been simpler to ask me to add the missing parent. Even so, I think I could see what it was trying to do and that the process was sort of understandable.
2. It asked me to select a father, which I did and then presented me with the existing family that the father was part of. It then incomprehensibly asked me to add a spouse to this family which already had a husband and wife or father and mother or two spouses. There was no spouse to add, and nothing in the data model can excuse confusing adding a child to an existing family with adding a spouse.
3. The third set of screens then did what they should have done given that I had moved on to the process of creating a new family.

In summary

• The system gave me the three options that I wanted in a logical order and the functionality worked as it should.
• Things would have been clearer if the process had been signposted better.
• The first option, to add a spouse to the existing family was a little confusing. Given that I had selected a process to add parents, it would have been clearer to give me the same screen but alter the title and text to ask me to add the missing parent to the existing family.
• The second option led me to pick the correct existing family that I wanted to add her to, but then inexplicably asked me to add a spouse to a family that already had a husband/wife/father/mother pair. This is totally incomprehensible. There was no spouse to add; having correctly previously prompted me to add a father, the screen I was presented with should have asked me to confirm that I wanted to add the child to that family. If it had then there would have been no problem.
• The third option works satisfactorily, but like the first would have benefited from better signposting.

The combination of no signposting, a confusing first option and an incomprehensible option later on left me completely baffled. I am sure that other users will be put in the same position.

As the functionality works well, all that is needed is to have the titles and text on the screens explain what they are for, perhaps with an initial explanation that three options will be presented.

[tom.willans]

You are not alone. I am having quirks and difficulty with the parent child relationship - see separate topic.

[kevinm]

@thejerrybryan

I’m sure most of you are thinking that this is a distinction without a difference and that I am making waves for no good reason. And that’s true most of the time in RM.

Jerry, when I first read this, I thought that you were saying most of us think that, most of the time, you make waves for no good reason.

Apologies if I misinterpreted. However, if I caught your intent then, at least for this sample size of 1, I feel the need to say that this is untrue. I’ve been a grateful recipient of your generous insights and knowledge sharing for a well over a decade. When your comments are directed at issues or weaknesses, they are always constructive and constructive waves can often be a precursor to momentum.

Since I’ve probably never directly said it before… thank you! Please keep it coming.

[thejerrybryan]

@kevinm

Since I’ve probably never directly said it before… thank you! Please keep it coming.

Thank you for your kind words.

No, I wasn’t trying to say that people think I routinely make waves for no good reason. What I was trying to say was 1) in this particular case, I’m making major waves on purpose, 2) it may appear in this particular case that the waves are being made for no good reason, and 3) that in my opinion at least, the waves in in this particular case are being made for a very good reason.

The very good reason is that in my opinion the lineage linked data model used by genealogy software to link spouses together with spouses and which links spouses and their children together has some pretty serious problems. In this thread, one of those problems manifests when you are trying to correct children and parents that are linked incorrectly. It often is not very easy to make such corrections and it’s very easy to blame the RM user interface. But I think the much larger problem is the data model itself.

Another manifestation of the problem is when you try to document parent/child relationships. I’ve given this example before, but let me give it again. I will be using real people rather than mythical John and Jane Does.

Tennessee had a very primitive statewide birth certificate system from 1908 to 1912 which was replaced by a modern style birth certificate system in 1914. My grandfather Emmert Bryan was born in 1898 before this system was in place. But he had sisters Edna Bryan who was born in 1908 and Willie Bryan who was born in 1910 who both had these very primitive birth certificates. So I wanted to enter these birth certificates into RM as evidence for their births, and also as evidence for their parentage.

Entering citations for the birth certificates as evidence for their births is straightforward. You simply attach a citation to the birth certificate to the Birth fact. But there is no fact for parentage, so there is no fact to which the birth certificate can be attached to link the sisters to their parents. This is a consequence of this lineage linked data model that I think is so inadequate. But RM does support a Parents line in the Edit Person screen. So I entered a citation for Edna’s birth certificate on the Parents line in her Edit Person screen. So far, so good.

Next, I switched over to Willie to enter citations for her birth certificate. Entering the citation to her Birth fact is straightforward. But when I looked at the Parents line in Willie’s Edit Person screen, the citation for Edna’s birth certificate was already there. What on earth does Edna’s birth certificate have to do with Willie? The standard genealogy data model is simply wrong, in my opinion. There needs to be some sort of parentage fact that links a particular person to their particular parents, irrespective of siblings and this amorphous thing called a “family” in the lineage linked data model. And of course, a person would need to be able to have multiple parentage facts for such things as birth parents and adoptive parents, and the parentage fact would need to work with single parent situations.

The same problem is actually there also in spousal relationships. But the problem sort of gets smoothed out most of the time by the presence of the Marriage fact. Evidence of “spousehood” can be attached to the Marriage fact. But this doesn’t always work. What if they were never married. Or what if they probably were actually married but there is no actual marriage record. For example, my sixth great grandfather was Thomas Bryan Sr. His will of 1793 mentions his “beloved wife Elizabeth”. But her surname is unknown and there is no extant record of their marriage. So do I enter a Marriage fact or not? And if not, where do I enter the will as evidence of their “spousehood”?

The data model needs to change, but it will never change. TMG had a fact for this purpose which I believe was called ChildParent, and it of course was non-standard. I have introduced a fact into my RM database called Parents, and of course it is non-standard. The data model needs to change, and it will never change. So we are stuck with problems of how to enter evidence of parentage and of “spousehhood”, and of how to create a user interface that makes it easy to clean up mis-linked family relationships.