Help talk:Conventions/Family relationships

Edits appreciated [14 October 2024]

Thanks

For the "not married" convention, I was trying to include couples who don't have children, since many people wish to document common-law and similar situations in modern times, even when the couple doesn't have children. Do you have an opinion about including such Family pages in WeRelate? If not, I'll modify the text a bit to include these couples.

--DataAnalyst 18:36, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Ahh. Yes. That use case was not clear to me from the original text, but now I understand. I sort of remember a "Common law" template at one time, but a quick search did not produce it. I don't have a strong opinion on this, so I am fine with rewording the section to include both scenarios (w/ and w/o children). --cos1776 18:57, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, it wasn't very obvious before - it was only in the heading. So I changed the heading and added a sentence about "common law". There is a template for this: CohabitationWithoutFormalities, which I plan to rename to NotMarried (waiting until next week).

Should vs May [14 October 2024]

Hi

The problem with allowing more than one set of parents (assuming neither is generally accepted yet) is that:

• If someone is looking only at the parents' family page, they can assume the child is generally accepted as their child, as there is no indication on that page that another set of parents has been proposed.
  • This creates a risk that speculative genealogy will get perpetuated as if it were accepted - as is already way too common.
• The parents' family pages show up as potential duplicates, adding to admin work (and resulting in a {{nomerge}} template that doesn't make sense when the issue is resolved).

There is no real reason why standard relationships should be created when only speculation exists. Even if the intention is to complete the research and resolve the relationship, too often, research stalls and the multiple relationships continue to exist for an extended period of time.

Note that the WeRelate Person page edit doesn't allow you to enter more than one set of Parents, and the Family page edit doesn't allow more than one Husband or Wife. Since the intention of the code is that only one such relationship can exist (and multiple relationships can only be created by going to another place to edit), I think we should make that a convention.--DataAnalyst 18:51, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I understand your concerns and agree that the ultimate goal is one set of parents per person. The "temporary" dup parents is something I encounter every now and again with some of the Northern VA families that Delijim and I frequently work on, as we merge Persons and wade through the old research and document the old errors. We usually do not have any issues with holding the pages in this "temporary" status with duplicate parents until it gets resolved. Sometimes that happens quickly and sometimes not, but there is usually a note prominently on the page explaining why both sets of parents are temporarily there, and we've been successful in moving most cases forward.

As you noted, this scenario usually only occurs following a Person page merge. Often, I am into a particular source that proves to me that the 2 people are the same, but I might not have the sources on hand at the time to prove who the parents were. If the Family pages already exist, it seems like it is a lot of extra work to unlink everyone and add the speculative templates to everyone's pages vs. temporarily leaving the dup parents linked until a new source is found to resolve it. It is also not as clear as seeing the dup parents (and other family members) directly on the Person page, waiting for resolution.

So ... I guess what I am trying to say, is that, of course, we shouldn't encourage dup parents, but it happens sometimes and, as a temporary situation, I don't think it affects our work flow that much. If I am working with the dup lists as an Admin and come across pages where I know some of our old-timers are actively working (even if it is over years), I usually leave them be, since I know they are more familiar with the research than I am in that area, and they will probably eventually resolve it.

If you feel strongly about switching back to "may" vs "should" for the instructions, I am ok with that.

--cos1776 20:29, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I get it. I am currently the Administrator of the dups list and I keep on top of it (resolve everything) at least weekly so that it doesn't build up. I can't see leaving multiples unresolved for years (partly because things fall off people's lists, and partly for the reasons documented under "Why enter data this way?"). However, I could see leaving things unresolved for about 3 months. Therefore, I added an exception in the larger section on Generally Accepted Relationships. Let me know what you think.

I changed the wording in the Quick Reference back to say "may". For those that read only the Quick Reference (e.g., when reading Help for editing a Person page), we want to discourage multiples. For those who dig deeper, they can find the exception.

As the administrator currently working on dups, I can add all the templates to change the relationships to speculative if things are still unresolved after 3 months.

If you think it not worth documenting the exception, I will remove it, and use my discretion on pages when they show up in the dups list.--DataAnalyst 21:12, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Roger. "larger section on Generally Accepted Relationships" looks fine to me. --cos1776 16:26, 15 October 2024 (UTC)