9 replies to this topic

[TomH]

I'm sure this has been expressed repeatedly for eons in the timespan of RootsMagic and maybe Family Origins before (parent relationships were not settable in FO9)  and that is, please let us do something useful with the relationships we can set in the Edit Person screen to that person's parents. It has no effect on anything, yet one can imagine it beneficially affecting narrative sentences, the format of lines on charts, ancestral filtering, etc.

 

What many do not realize is that the parents last displayed on a Main Screen View is the one that will be followed in any RootsMagic ancestral filter, even if it is not a Birth line, and only the last displayed parent line will be followed thus potentially omitting the birth lineage for some person(s) in a tree.

 

As a workaround in the interim until RootsMagic is suitably enhanced, I offer this SQLite script:

Children - Set Lineage to Birth

Edited by TomH, 18 October 2015 - 01:07 PM.

[Vyger]

As a workaround in the interim until RootsMagic is suitably enhanced, I offer this SQLite script:

Children - Set Lineage to Birth

 

I will continue to hope and dream while living of your solutions in the absence of Rootsmagic ones

[Lethdun]

Great! Maybe this will be implemented in the next version of RM. Thank you, TomH 

 

TomD

[zhangrau]

In addition, I'd like to see the selection in the drop-down for Alternate Name to be accessible and usable in reports.

[Renee Zamora]

Confirming enhancement requests are in our tracking system.

[Laura]

When I add the first set of paremts to a child, the relationship to the parents is automaticaally Birth for both parents.

When I add a second set of parents, the default is Birth.

I added 4 sets of parents to a person and the default was always Birth.

I can't see a way of selecting the birth parents to be the focus parents for everyone in the database working for those users that don't change or don't know to change the relationship.

Which parents with Birth would RM select, the first parents which were linked. That could be a stepfather or stepmother or adoptive parents. Or, only parents with both parents with Birth selected. That won't work if there are multiple set of parents with Birth.

And what happens of there are no birth parents with the Birth parents selected. What does RM do then.

[TomH]

Of course, there will be those who may quibble with outcomes of program changes but surely it does not take much imagination to see the benefits outweigh the traps that some may have created for themselves. And those are traps they already have, not ones created as a consequence of program changes.

For example, having assigned multiple birth parents is fundamentally wrong unless you can discriminate with different levels of Proof, which RootsMagic also offers but does nothing with. If lineage is restricted to only one set of birth parents, then obviously it should be the one with the highest proof else, if proofs are equal, the first or last set of .parents assigned. Alternatively, lineage could be enhanced to include multiple parents lines...

There is much that could be done in RootsMagic's outputs to improve their scope. Have settings options to restrict to birth line, include adoptive lines, include foster lines, include step lines... It does not have to be the equivalent of my script that drives the process. Why should outputs follow the paths last traversed by the user in the main screen? Why not have a Primary setting for Parents and another tie breaker for outputs to follow Primary setting. In the absence of Birth parents, the line should end according to these user settings, e.g., stop if there is no Birth parent, continue if the relationship type is within the selected includes.

For charts and reports that are chart like, it would be very attractive and informative to see solid lines for birth relationships, broken lines for others.

[zhangrau]

It seems there is a lot more in the news, these days, about non-nuclear families than there was in the news of 2 or 3 decades ago.

 

However, I have documented adoptions and foster families in my surname-related line from at least 100 years ago. For some of those I have both birth and adoptive parents. Similarly, I have been working for a dozen years on a side project drawing on more-ancient historical records. In that project I have several adoptions noted in the years between 100 BC and 500 AD. I keep all of my projects in one main database, including research I've done for friends that currently do not include a link to my main tree. The database includes 380K individuals, with 83% connected into that main tree. A report of <adoption> <exists> returned over 100 individuals.

Given that non-nuclear families have been with us for at least a couple of thousand years, and that they involve multiple links of importance to us, it would be nice if RM had a way to output these more-complex relationships (both narrative and charted).

[Laura]

I didn't create a trap for myself when RM added Birth to 4 sets of parents by default.

Many users have posted over the years that didn't know where those relationships on the Family view screen came from and don't know where to change them. They didn't create a trap for themselves either.

I don't add more than one set of birth parents. I just wanted to see what happened with the default when multiple parents were added.

I was asking questions not quibbling, but I will.

I don't think a global solution that depends on the relationship chosen on the Edit person screen is going to work. Too many users may not know it is there or change it.

I would rather see a check box that is prominent in the right pane with the Relationship menus on the Edit person screen that you could check for the parents you want RM to use for lineage reports.

Make the label Red so it will draw the eye and be harder to ignore.

Or put another button at the top of the Edit person.screen which opens a drop down menu to choose the parents from.

Then, if the user wanted to use adopted parents or a stepparent and birth parent for a lineage report they could.

Make it user's choice not RM's automatic choice for which RM is going to have to depend on what the user does anyway.

[TomH]

We are asking for pretty much the same things, Laura. I don't want to see my workaround incorporated as the solution - that merely forces a birth lineage within the constraints of RootsMagic 7. Users need better control over the lineage that gets coloured, grouped, displayed, exported, reported and charted. The lineage scope needs to be expanded under user choice to include more than one type of relationship. I described potential changes to Edit Person such as Primary Parents similar to what you outlined. Additionally, enhancements in report settings to control which relation types to include and the capability to traverse more than one set of parents for a child.