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Archiver > TMG > 2002-07 > 1025615962


From: "Ted Meikle" <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] 5.02 relationship tags
Date: Tue, 02 Jul 2002 08:19:22 -0500
References: <87.1da5502a.2a520ab1@cs.com>


wrote:

> Jo that is exactly why I want to change the current mother father tags. It
> is confusing. Say I make the step father the primary father since he raised
> the child. I also know who the birth father is. Both fathers are linked on
> the person view of the child. But if you look at it, the step father is
> marked as Father and the birth father is marked as Father-Bio. HUH? What I
> am proposing would be to make the Father tag in this case say Father-stp, and
> everyone would know that you had made the step father the primary father.
> This may not matter to you if you follow straight genealogy, but what about
> candidate parents? I have a tag called Father-CAN. It is for men I think
> (and have reasonable reason to think this) are the fathers of certain
> children. It would be nice on the person view of those children to see the
> father as Father-CAN indicating that this father is NOT the actual proven
> biological father of the children, but an assumption.
> Teresa Ghee Elliott

I am glad you are beating this drum, Teresa. Last September, I suggested the following:

Problem 3. If you make the Father-Ado (or Mother-Ado) link primary,
the fact that the link is an adoptive link becomes totally invisible
to the user looking at the screen views for the adopted child. On the
Person View, the father is identified only by the button at the
bottom, which says "FATHER" and gives no indication that this
relationship is an adoptive relationship. The only way the user could
ever notice that this is an adoptive relationship is by clicking on
the "Father" button as if he were going to edit it. On the Family
View, the adoptive father is only identified as "Father" and there is
no way to tell otherwise from that view. On the Tree View, there is no
indication that the person in the father slot is anything other than a
biological father, and there is no way to tell from that view.

I suggest this change: Whenever a parent/child relationship is not a
biological relationship, text should be added that states what the
relationship is. Thus on the Person View, the "Father" button would
say "Adoptive Father." If the relationship was some other custom
relationship created by the user, the text box would read according to
a "label" field the user filled in when he created the custom
relationship tag.

The Tree View would also incorporate these modifications...

The full text is at:
http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/ifetch2?/u1/textindices/T/TMG+2001+1987834350309+F

To those who have responded to you saying they like it the way it is, there is no reason
the screen could not simply say "father" for the 99% of the cases where it is the biological father, and change only
when needed.

Ted

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