WhiteSR

Thanks again Renee for your help.

I can see things will get complicated when each partner to a marriage/partnership has previous or subsequent marriages/partnership and certainly if they have more than 1 previous or subequent marriage/partnership.

I will look at what you suggest.

But I wonder if my problem is that the way I am thinking of things in my example is that Parents 1, 2  and 3 can never be descendants.  They are ancestors and their children are their descendants.

Obviously Parents 1, 2 and 3 are descandants of their (ancestor) parents who, in turn, are descendants of their (ancestor) parents.

But in considering just two generations is it not OK to refer to the parents as ancestors and their children as descendants?  Or does everyone have to be considered a descendant?

But, yes, you are right.  I would like to line of descent to issue from the line of relationship between spouse/partners.

Many thanks, Renee, but I am puzzled by your reply.

Suppose we have

Three parents, Parent 1, Parent  2 and Parent 3 and Parent 2's first marriage was to Parent 1 and second marriage to Parent 3.

From the first marriage a child was born.

At the moment, as far as I can tell, the line of descent to the child will emerge from either Parent 1 or Parent 2 and not from the line showing a marriage between them.

If, for example, it emerges from Parent 2 it would not be possible to tell whether the child was a child of Parent 1 or 3.

And if Parent 1 also had a second marriage and the line of descent emreged from him/her it would not be possible to tell whether any children were the children of Parent 2 or Parent 1's second partner.

Having the line of descent joined to the line of the relevant marriage or relationship, makes this clear.  And this is what I would like to be able to achieve.