I have a cousin who, never married, went to a facility to be ‘inseminated’ to have a child.
I have another who had a child out of wedlock with an unknown man.
Why are they listed as having an Unknown spouse when they know there was no spouse?
John
RootsMagic defaults to 2 parents as the norm. When you have 1 off cases as you have they are exceptions.
In the data model used by RM and by most other genealogy software, a child is not really connected to a mother as an individual nor to a father as an individual. Rather, the child is connected to a couple as a whole. It’s like the couple is in a box with two slots, one slot for the father and one slot for the mother. The child is connected to the box, and not to either one of the slots. One of the slots can be empty, as in your case. But the child is still connected to the box as a whole and not to the mother’s slot.
On the RM screen where you see Unknown Spouse, that’s just the way RM shows it on the screen. But there really is nothing there. The slot is really is empty. Depending on the RM report you might run, the report probably will not actually say Unknown Spouse for the empty slot. Rather, the report will say nothing for the empty slot which is probably what you want to see in a report.
It reminds me of cases where a piece of paper will have nothing on it except that it says This Page Left Blank. The Unknown Spouse message on this screen is RM’s way of saying This Parent Slot Left Blank.
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It is a bit annoying nevertheless. It would be better if the word “spouse” was left off - just have it read “Unknown”.
I believe that the number of years that word has been in place for the program lends great difficulty to changing it.
I often wonder if it wouldn’t be better off just to leave the space on screen blank. That way there wouldn’t be any implicit judgement about the identity and role of the missing parent. There are just so many possibilities.
There is your example where the missing parent was a (probably anonymous) sperm donor. I have a case where the biological parents are both completely unknown and where the child was raised by a single unmarried step parent who is the only parent listed in my RM database. I have a case where a married father was killed in war and where the child was given up by the mother for adoption by the father’s unmarried brother. So the child has two sets of parents in my database - the biological parents, and the adoptive father who was single. Then I have lots of cases of an unmarried single mother and an unknown father.. I have children whose step parents were their grandparents or a single grandparent. I have children whose stepparents were an aunt and uncle or sometimes just a single aunt. This surely only scratches the surface of all the possibilities. Not all of them have a blank slot for a parent, but many of them do.
Really?? I find that quite worrying, does it mean RM11 is just a ‘front-end’ bolted onto old programming technology?
Stephen Turner
You lost me here. I was referring to the many times that the issue of using/replacing the word Spouse have been discussed… without any change.
Edit: I am aware that RM’s programming language (Pascal) was first introduced 55 years ago.
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Oh good. It’s not the program then that’s the problem, it’s the communications.
Stephen Turner
I programmed in Cobol, Pascal, Fortran and some other early 80s languages. Pretty sure RM is written on much high level. Also it was completely re-written with RM 8.
Kevin
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Ah the fun with punch cards LOL
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I am not quite THAT old – but we did have a whopping 248K of RAM which was actually impressive at the time and we had two 10 meg platter removable hard drives on that PDP 11/34 
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Oh sure, Delphi has evolved immensely since its early Borland days, but they still program in Object Pascal, linking and calling into the wide range of library offerings.
I’ve used Bruce Buzbee’s software since about 1991, so am aware of the evolutions.
34 years is a long time. Delphi does Android and IOS applications also if I recall.