Re: New user needs help with unmarried partners
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In reply to:
New user needs help with unmarried partners
2/01/02
Although the program uses the term "spouse" to describe the relationship between two people who had children, they will not be shown as being married unless there is a marriage event. When you create a family, FO will prompt you to add a marriage event, but in your case you should not. If you wish to make it explicit that they did not marry, you can place that information in the family note.
Step relationships are implicitly identified by the organiztion of families. If Albert and Allison have a child Andrew, and the marriage ends through divorce or death, then all that information goes into family A. If Albert subsequently marrys Bertha, then you create a new family B by adding Bertha as an addtional spouse of Albert. By arranging the spouses in chronological order, you implicitly identify Bertha as a step mother to Andrew. From a purely information management and genealogical perspective, this should be sufficient.
This doesn't help the family historian who wants the child to appear in reports with the step parent. A person can be linked to multiple parents to allow this. If you do this, please be kind to genealogists in future generations and include very specific notes.