wie kann man eine Gruppenregel erstellen, welche alle “unknown spouses”
findet ?
I don’t think there is a way to make a group of “unknown spouses”, nor to do an Advanced Search to find them.
The best you can do is to use Couple View and click at the top of the Mother column or the Father column to sort by that column. This will locate the unknown spouses for you and you can work with them from there. For example, you can select one of them and switch immediately to Family view to see the context of the “unknown spouse”. You can also set the side panel to Life Summary and see the context of the “unknown spouse” there.
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Through inference:
by family attributes
Number of spouses greater than 0
WILL INCLUDE Unknown spouses in a much greater list of people that are members of a Couple relationship, but additional criteria filtering is stymied because there are no physical records in the database for these “inferred” matches.
ja das habe ich schon gemacht; das sind bei mir über 400 Personen
gibt es wirklich keine Selektionsmöglichkeit nach “unknown” ?
SELECTION requires actual people that are actually in the database. CANNOT select that which does not exist.
Unknown is just a visual placeholder “label” substitute for human readers to understand that no Person has yet been entered for that position in family trees.
There really isn’t a way to filter on “unknown”. Well, you could enter an actual person and give them the name of “unknown” instead of omitting the person. You could then filter on the actual name of “unknown”. But most standards and recommendations for data entry suggest not entering a name as “unknown”. Rather, they usually suggest omitting the person.
It would be a really nice RM enhancement to be able to filter on omitted spouses.
I noticed that the Enhanced Properties Report captures the list of “unknown Spouses” under Families: Families w/ 1 parent. You can view that list and save it to a file, but I cannot see a way to translate the logic to a a rule for a group.
Gruss @thburkhart !
Does the advanced search criteria provide a way to search for blank names? If so, can the (name == EMPTY) criteria be used alone or in combination with (number of spouses > 0) to find the specific records (persons with unknown spouses)?
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JJW
Yes, you can search for blank names. But that doesn’t mean that you can search for non-existent people. That simply is not possible at the present time.
A search for the name “EMPTY” would literally search for someone whose name was “EMPTY”.
Problem Search, Problem List can look for anyone missing a primary or alternate given name. You can print the list afterwards or add them to a task. If you want to add them to a group open their Edit Person screen from the list to include them.
The filter on Advanced Search is under Name, Given name - is blank.
I may be misunderstanding the question, but I don’t think that will find unknown spouses. The original question was “How can I create a group rule that finds all “unknown spouses”?” The classic way to find “unknown spouses” is simply to go to Couples View and sort either by the Father column or by the Mother column. But that doesn’t make a group.
Perhaps @thburkhart is defining “unknown spouse” as a spouse who exists in the database but has no name entered. Alternatively, it is a spouse who is non-existent in the database (has not been entered at all) but must exist in reality (i.e. because children are registered for the person of interest). In the former case, the search criteria seems to be (number of spouses > 0) + ((give) name is blank). In the latter case, the search is not possible … unless it is possible to search identically for something akin to (number of spouses = 0) + (number of children > 0)??
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JJW
Given the structure of RM’s database, that particular situation is literally impossible. You can’t have children without having a spouse, even if the spouse is null. I realize that sounds like a contradiction in terms. Maybe it should be, you can’t have children without having a couple, even if half of the couple is null.
What probably needs to happen instead to provide the needed functionality is an enhancement to be able to search on “spouse is null” or “parent is null”. That would be technically possible and not particularly hard to do, but it is not presently supported.
OK. I see the distinctions.
Interesting that one cannot propagate children until one has generated a family unit. I suggest to consider whether this limitation perhaps should also be lifted. Consider an unmarried person who adopts a child. The child has no chance to exist in RM.
If the search criteria for “unknown …” is eventually included, I suggest that (spouse/parent is missing) is more intuitive sounding than (spouse/parent is null/empty/omitted).
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JJW
That is completely doable. Add a single individual parent and then add a child to that single individual parent. Add more children, too, or propagate the tree further downward. There is no requirement to add both (or two) parents or add a marriage.
However, the program’s own visual representation is more genealogical in convention (by labels and terms) than others may wish for, in terms of today’s modern realm of family composition possibilities (ie. the program operates from an implied visual representation that a “tree” is directional via the zygote process of fusion between the female gamete and male gamete). What’s “implied” is that wherever there’s one of those gametes, the opposing one had to exist (despite perhaps not being entered or at least, not yet).
Actually, such a child exists in RM just fine. The data unit for a family always has two slots for parents, and zero or more slots for children. A single adoptive parent occupies one of the two slots for parents and the other slot is empty. RM displays such an empty slot as “Unknown spouse” which is possibly not the best thing to call it. But calling it something different would not make the empty slot go away. Which is to repeat, there are always two slots for parents in the family unit, even if one of them is empty. There are no family units with only the one slot. And a child cannot be connected directly to either of the parents. The child can only be connected to a family unit.
A child can be connected to more than one family unit. Examples might be birth parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, “raised by” parents, etc.
I’m being technically accurate. That is the way RM does it. That’s the GEDCOM does it. That’s the way a lot of software does it, and I even dare say that’s the way most software does it. Software that might do it another way has a struggle in mapping their way to and from GEDCOM.
By the way, I’m not saying I think it’s a good model. I don’t. I think there are several things wrong with the model, not just the way it deals with single parents. But it is pretty much the standard model throughout genealogy.
I have tried a lot of suggestions on here as to how to find UNKNOWN spouses-- found out that the only 2 that work is the suggestion from @thejerrybryan to go to the couples list or @kevinm 's suggestion of going to Families w/ 1 parent under Enhanced Properties Report – The advantage to Kevin’s approach is that you can print the report either on paper or to a file…
The reason the other suggestions do NOT work is because the spouse does NOT EXIST as he has no name --if however you enter UNKNOWN or ? etc as their name then most of the suggestions would work BUT it MIGHT not be limited to spouses only…
@kevinm the only way that @thburkhart can get a group is to use the list and actually give the unnamed person a name— such as a given name or surname that is
Unknown ( wife of Henry Smith)
Unknown ( mother of George Jones)
Unknown ( father of Sally Acorn)
? ( mother of George Dunn)
just be consistent using all given or all surnames-- it doesn’t matter if you use brackets or parenthesis or don’t – doesn’t matter if you use father of/ mother of or/ wife of— keep in mind that if you use ? or unknown as a given name it will sort the names at the beginning of the index and if you use Unknown as a surname it will sort these at the end-- that is part of why i say to be consistent
Once you name these people, you can either just select them again using your list from before ( suggest you add what you named them to that list for easy access) or do a search for Unknown or maybe ( —or something that is consistent to all entries
note and as you can see my list is NOT consistent as over the years I’ve done different things and it’s not just spouses…
0nce done you just hit group at the top of the page and give the group a name and ok and your group is created
I know a lot of people suggest you leave the Unknown spouse empty without any name entered BUT @thburkhart wants to make a group-- the only other way where you could make a group is to create your group and select one by one the spouse of the unknown spouse
The Enhanced Properties List is an incredibly valuable resource, but I confess I very seldom use it. And as a result, I sometimes forget when I am answering questions that certain tools do exist somewhere in the Enhanced Properties List. Mea culpa.
So if the Enhanced Properties List is such an incredibly valuable resource, why do I so seldom use it? I think it’s a matter of a personal style of working. I like to do Advanced Searches and to make groups and to filter lists. For example, instead of going to the Enhanced Properties List to find Unused Places, wouldn’t it be nice if the main Places list had a filters for “used” and “unused”. I think the user interface simply feels much more integrated when it works that way.
Inspired by this whole thread, I have been looking in my database for families with 1 parent to see if there were cases where I could identify the second parent. I would prefer to see the list of families with 1 parent via Advanced Search or by making a group. But what I have been doing instead is to use the Couples view under People. Doing it that way doesn’t allow me to make a report that I can print to paper or that I can save to a file as I can do from the Enhanced Properties list. But doing it that way does allow me to highlight a person and then switch immediately to another view such as Family view or Descendant view and work the problem from there.
For me as a sample size of 1, that allows me to have a workflow that feels very integrated. I certainly respect the value of “making a report” and then “working the report”. But that is not my work style. The Couples view works very well for me. In effect, it becomes my report or my to do list for this project. And items automatically drop off my to do list for the project as I find a second parent for a family. But I still would very much prefer to be using Advanced Search or a group to identify my 1 parent families.
I was working on my 1 parent families for a few minutes this morning, and I found myself, as they say, “hoisted on my own petard” (or I shot myself in the foot, or whatever metaphor you might prefer).
I have a person in my database who was born 12 May 1909 and who died 12 May 1909 and whose death certificate says that she lived only for a half hour. And yet she is a parent in a 1 parent family. And she is that way on purpose. Why would I have such a bizarre arrangement in my database on purpose?
It has to do with printed reports. I use the register format (NEHGS format) to produce printed reports for family reunions. In that format, parents are listed with a list of the children. When a person is listed in the list of children, not all of their data is listed, only their basic BMD data. The children are then carried forward to the next generation if they have a spouse or if they have children. It is in the next generation that all of the data for the person is listed.
If a person is not carried forward to the next generation, then the entry in the list of children with their parents is their only appearance in the report. It sometimes happens that a person who is not carried forward to the next generation has a lot of data, and such a person looks terrible with all that data in what otherwise is a simple list of children.
As a result, I have developed a trick to force a person with a lot of data but who has no spouse or children to be carried forward to the next generation in printed reports. The trick is two-fold. First, I give such people a dummy child. As such, it is my choice which people get the dummy child and which do not. The dummy child has the effect of getting the person carried forward to the next generation. Second, I obviously do not want the dummy child actually to print in reports. So before printing, I run an SQLite script which removes the dummy child from RM’s ChildTable. The person who is to be carried forward still is in a family unit as a the spouse of a 1 parent family, and that gets them carried forward even though they don’t have a child.
This SQLite script would corrupt my RM database, so before printing I make a copy of my RM database, run the script against the copy, run my printed report against the copy, and delete the copy. My production database is never corrupted or otherwise damaged by this process. But the bottom line is that the dummy children which actually are in my production database do have the effect of making people such as this infant who only lived for 30 minutes into the parent of a 1 parent family. Indeed, that’s the whole point of this whole convoluted procedure. So when I’m looking for people who are the spouse of a 1 parent family, I have to ignore these special people. If I could find the parents of a 1 spouse family with Advanced Search or by making a group, I could surely have the search criteria set up to ignore these special people.
And before I end, I should mention that I would very much prefer not to have to go through this bizarre process to get a person carried forward to the next generation in printed reports. I really wish there was a way that was supported by RM to get this effect. And I really don’t want and wouldn’t use a report option that simply carried everyone forward to the next generation. That would be even worse. I need to be able to select which people need this special treatment in printed reports.
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OK. My reading stopped at the comma in the original posting. The exception “even if the spouse is null” went right past me.
The corrections to my lack of critical reading are appreciated.
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JJW