3 replies to this topic

[danho32]

I have an individual who was adopted almost one year after birth.  At the time of adoption his name was legally changed.  I have added the Adoption Fact to the individual.  However this dos not add the additional parents nor does it change his name.  How do I add the new parents and show them as adoptive parents and how do I change his name?

[TomH]

RootsMagic supports only one Primary name and the only name variables in event sentence template language draw from it alone. So you will have to choose which name you enter as his Primary name and add the other as an Alternate Name fact/event. If you choose his adoptive name, then you would add his birth name as the Alternate, with Date: until dd Mmm yyyy. You can set the name type in the drop down list but it has no apparent effect on anything yet. You could customize the sentence locally to something like "<[Date:plain], > [Person] was known by his birth name, [Desc]."

There is more than one way to connect a child to parents as you will see from a quick look in Help: right-click on the child and select from the drop down list or navigate to the couple in Family View and click on the Add a child link in the space below them. Once linked to the adoptive parents, open the Edit Person screen for the child and set the relationship to the parents to "Adoptive", although that has no known effect at this time, either.

[danho32]

Thanks Tom - I think you finally have me on the right track for understanding this program better.  It's sort of a paradigm shift after using TMG for years.

[History Hunter]

This issue of fields that do nothing has been a source of frustration for me. Under the Adoption fact, the "Parents" field also seems to do nothing. These extraneous fields are misleading and give one the impression that RM7 does something that it does not.

I still haven't found a good way of dealing with legal name changes, whatever the reason. Sure would be nice if RM8 fixed this.