Same Sex Marriages

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

Nowadays many countries as well as a number of states and cities in the USA have legal same sex marriages.

Children born during those marriages (or sometimes <g> pre-existing also) are in some countries regarded as (adopted / legalised) children of the two partners. Many couples in effect regard the children as "from their relationship" so they are part of "the family".

 

Now, I know TMG works primarily with bloodlines to register the genealogy of individuals.

 

But if we want to stay "current" with the todays legal (and social) situation in those situations what is the best way or standard practice to deal with those same sex relations to present them in TMG (and Second Site) in such a way. TMG refuses to put two same sex partners in the Father and Mother fields of Add a Person. Can this be circumvented?

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Peter,

 

This topic has been discussed on many occasions, especially on the TMG e-mail list. You might search the archives of this list with a variety of appropriate terms for other ideas and comments.

 

There is an easy way to customize TMG to deal with these "non-standard" relationships. Many people create a custom tag in the MARRIAGE group that appropriately describes whatever the relationship may be. While TMG may "warn" you that the SEX flags for both are the same, it will allow you to do this. Next, you can create a custom set of relationship tags, such as '-Oth' relationships. You can then go to the child and link it as a child-oth to both parental individuals in the custom MARRIAGE-like tag above but leave/make the relationships of child to parent non-Primary. Thus the child can have two "Mother-Oth" or "Father-Oth" without any problem, and the Primary positions of Father and Mother can remain blank. That example was quick, so ask if it is unclear.

 

What most people have to decide with their TMG data in this circumstance is what the Ancestor/Descendant reports and charts will do, and how you (also?) link the child to the two biological parents that provided the genes. If one parent is a biological parent then you have at least one link and the other "parent" works somewhat like a step-parent. If not, then you have much the same issue as dealing with a child being adopted by a complete new set of parents right after birth, with all of the child's name and associations being with those parents and that family but none of its genes. You have to make choices, is your TMG data to reflect social relationships or genetic, or try to do both at once and therefore inevitably neither well? TMG is obviously designed for genetics, but is so flexible and customizable that it can (also) work for recording a social relationship. You simply have to recognize that there will be trade-offs.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

Hi Peter,

 

This topic has been discussed on many occasions, especially on the TMG e-mail list. You might search the archives of this list with a variety of appropriate terms for other ideas and comments.

 

Thanks, I had searched the forums but forgotten about the mailinglist at Rootsweb.

 

 

There is an easy way to customize TMG to deal with these "non-standard" relationships. Many people create a custom tag in the MARRIAGE group that appropriately describes whatever the relationship may be. While TMG may "warn" you that the SEX flags for both are the same, it will allow you to do this. Next, you can create a custom set of relationship tags, such as '-Oth' relationships. You can then go to the child and link it as a child-oth to both parental individuals in the custom MARRIAGE-like tag above but leave/make the relationships of child to parent non-Primary. Thus the child can have two "Mother-Oth" or "Father-Oth" without any problem, and the Primary positions of Father and Mother can remain blank. That example was quick, so ask if it is unclear.

 

Thanks. Will research this further during the weekend. I had managed to get the marriage with the standard tag, telling TMG to ignore the same sex situation. The children have the oth-mother tag and reversely the social parent has the kids as son-oth. But they are not in the Family subsection of those two social parents, instead they have their own with an unknown second parent and the social parent is in its own family sub-section (in Second Site) without any children.

 

BTW (trying to invoke a discussion here <g>) am I the only one who thinks it is odd that we have standard tags for non-genealogy items like Military Begin and End but not for a (arguably) more important social item as in which social family children are growing up. That we have to add those (in some countries also legally equal to other marriages) tags ourselves? Or less a controverse: if we have adoption and stepchildren readily available as a tag why not these tags as described above?

 

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

 

It certainly did (<g> invoked a lot of pondering also). Thanks once again.

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[Michael Hannah 0]

BTW (trying to invoke a discussion here )

That is one of the purposes of this forum

am I the only one who thinks it is odd that we have standard tags for non-genealogy items like Military Begin and End but not for a (arguably) more important social item as in which social family children are growing up.

Not really odd when you consider how many years TMG has existed. To me the value of TMG is that you can create custom tags so very easily for all kinds of situations. The fact that they are not part of the limited set of legacy standard tags does not bother me, nor do I think it odd.

 

Glad it gave you ideas,

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

TMG was and still is set up to follow bloodlines. Even if your daughter and her girlfriend can legally marry and "have" kids, the kids have to have a birth father. You can find work arounds to the problem, but as Bob once said, "If you lie to the program, it will lie to you." Same goes for adoptions, step-children...

Now if it were me, and I really wanted to convey to the world that they were the parents, as in biological parents, then I would lie to both the program and them. I would make one of them Male, and add her as a birth father. She does not have to know she is listed as male, if you edit every tag sentence to put in "She" instead of "He".

 

Just remember years from now, someone else reading your report may be mislead by the information. You'd be better off to say Sally and an unknown man were the parents of Johnny. Sally married Susan in 2008. Sally and Susan raised the following children as their own: Johnny, Billy, Susie and Sarah.

 

 

At least that would be the truth.

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

am I the only one who thinks it is odd that we have standard tags for non-genealogy items like Military Begin and End but not for a (arguably) more important social item as in which social family children are growing up.

 

mjh wrote:

 

Not really odd when you consider how many years TMG has existed. To me the value of TMG is that you can create custom tags so very easily for all kinds of situations. The fact that they are not part of the limited set of legacy standard tags does not bother me, nor do I think it odd.

 

Glad it gave you ideas,

 

Yes, you can create custom tags and that is the power of TMG but ... custom tags have to be maintained over time in new releases by myself I fear. So if Same Sex Marriages are becoming a <g> standard situation in some countries and states and cities in the USA I would hope a tag would be added to the tag standard list as it has been added for adoptions etc. which are essentially also only legal children and therefore in no different position as children who grow up in legalised same sex marriages.

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

TMG was and still is set up to follow bloodlines.

 

I read that time and time again in other posts of different people as "following bloodlines" being genealogy and "please do not call it" (portraying family history) "genealogy, but family history". Well I fear that that distinction for TMG to follow bloodlines has been superseded by its marketing in the site's header:

 

<VBG>

 

Wholly Genes Software - Power tools for the family historian.

 

 

Even if your daughter and her girlfriend can legally marry and "have" kids, the kids have to have a birth father. You can find work arounds to the problem, but as Bob once said, "If you lie to the program, it will lie to you." Same goes for adoptions, step-children...

 

Nice quote of Bob but I still think that if adoptions are readily available the same should go for same sex marriages bringing up children in that marriage.

 

Now if it were me, and I really wanted to convey to the world that they were the parents, as in biological parents, then I would lie to both the program and them. I would make one of them Male, and add her as a birth father. She does not have to know she is listed as male, if you edit every tag sentence to put in "She" instead of "He".

 

Just remember years from now, someone else reading your report may be mislead by the information. You'd be better off to say Sally and an unknown man were the parents of Johnny. Sally married Susan in 2008. Sally and Susan raised the following children as their own: Johnny, Billy, Susie and Sarah.

 

 

At least that would be the truth.

 

I am not intending to lie to anyone and my point is <g> that I currently have to go to all kind of hoola-hoops to make TMG and Second Site automatically present the full truth as I intend to disclose it.

 

The situation is not always that the persons (besides IVF there may also be situations with two man involved adopting or bringing in children from a previous marriage also) marry legally after the children have been given birth. In this situation they are, but .... that was only because legal same sex marriage was not - only partner-registration - available at the time they decided that one of them was going to have children. But situations vary wildly of course.

 

Your first proposed workaround to add one of the woman / man with the other sexe would not be hidden in all situations. At least my guess is that the background color in the charts would be wrong.

 

But agree with you that the presentation as you mention at the end of your post is a nice workaround really presenting the situation as it is. So I repeat my request: why no standard tag (and applicable narrative wording) for these situations. Adoptions are brought automatically into the right Family sub-header don't they?

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[Terry Reigel 0]

Nice quote of Bob but I still think that if adoptions are readily available the same should go for same sex marriages bringing up children in that marriage....

 

...I am not intending to lie to anyone and my point is that I currently have to go to all kind of hoola-hoops to make TMG and Second Site automatically present the full truth as I intend to disclose it...

 

 

...Your first proposed workaround to add one of the woman / man with the other sexe would not be hidden in all situations. At least my guess is that the background color in the charts would be wrong.

 

So I repeat my request: why no standard tag (and applicable narrative wording) for these situations. Adoptions are brought automatically into the right Family sub-header don't they?

The problem is that really isn't a "standard tag with applicable wording" for adoptions either. (The standard Adopted tag is an event tag, which reports the event of adoption but has nothing to do with how the relationship is depicted.

 

The -Ado, -Fst, and -God relationship tags put those labels on the Details view. Period. They do nothing to characterize the relationship in any special way. If you make them Primary they will depict the relationship as a biological parent/child relationship in all the TMG screens and reports that recognize such relationships. (I think that might be what Bob meant by "lying to the program.") You need to add additional tags if you want to have those relationships used in reports and be accurately described.

 

Users have asked for additional capabilities to record those types of relationships, which would clearly be helpful.

 

Same-sex marriages with children are a more difficult issue, because the whole fabric of traditional genealogical reports which TMG produces are based on the expectation that each child has a mother and father of the traditional sexes. That expectation is carried into the TMG screens themselves - for example the "Father" and "Mother" labels at the top of the screen, and even the display in the Tree view, which is modeled on a traditional Pedigree chart.

 

While clearly there is user demand for features to accomodate the variety of family situations we now see more commonly, it is also clear that doing so will require revisiting some fundamentals on which the program was designed. I don't envy Bob Velke in trying to find solutions.

 

In the meantime, TMG does offer the flexibity to go quite a way towards recording and describing these relationships, but requires some effort on the part of the user.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Yes, you can create custom tags and that is the power of TMG but ... custom tags have to be maintained over time in new releases by myself I fear.

Perhaps I can set your mind somewhat at ease. In the about 15 years I have been using TMG the company/author has made a point to do everything they can to avoid destroying user data, and to ensure that a new version will automatically bring forward both old data and customizations. There may be a requirement, like there was when going from Version 6 to Version 7, to take specific steps to automatically convert your dataset from the old version to the new. However, historically with this program I feel safe to say that any custom tags you create in a dataset will be retained in some manner in future versions. I certainly hope so, as I am someone who has created a lot of custom tags. In fact, I believe that there are very few tags that I use that are "standard" or with their default sentences/definitions. I don't find that odd or inappropriate because I firmly believe that the very essence of genealogy is personal, and the documentation and ultimate narration should be able to reflect that. In my opinion the "standard" tags are simply a way to get started and be used for the simple and basic data and events. But their real purpose is simply as "starting points" or "examples" for the user to customize the tags, sentences, and narratives that they personally need and want to use.

 

Just my opinion

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

TMG was and still is set up to follow bloodlines.

 

I read that time and time again in other posts of different people as "following bloodlines" being genealogy and "please do not call it" (portraying family history) "genealogy, but family history". Well I fear that that distinction for TMG to follow bloodlines has been superseded by its marketing in the site's header:

 

<VBG>

 

Wholly Genes Software - Power tools for the family historian.

 

 

Even if your daughter and her girlfriend can legally marry and "have" kids, the kids have to have a birth father. You can find work arounds to the problem, but as Bob once said, "If you lie to the program, it will lie to you." Same goes for adoptions, step-children...

 

Nice quote of Bob but I still think that if adoptions are readily available the same should go for same sex marriages bringing up children in that marriage.

 

Now if it were me, and I really wanted to convey to the world that they were the parents, as in biological parents, then I would lie to both the program and them. I would make one of them Male, and add her as a birth father. She does not have to know she is listed as male, if you edit every tag sentence to put in "She" instead of "He".

 

Just remember years from now, someone else reading your report may be mislead by the information. You'd be better off to say Sally and an unknown man were the parents of Johnny. Sally married Susan in 2008. Sally and Susan raised the following children as their own: Johnny, Billy, Susie and Sarah.

 

 

At least that would be the truth.

 

I am not intending to lie to anyone and my point is <g> that I currently have to go to all kind of hoola-hoops to make TMG and Second Site automatically present the full truth as I intend to disclose it.

 

The situation is not always that the persons (besides IVF there may also be situations with two man involved adopting or bringing in children from a previous marriage also) marry legally after the children have been given birth. In this situation they are, but .... that was only because legal same sex marriage was not - only partner-registration - available at the time they decided that one of them was going to have children. But situations vary wildly of course.

 

Your first proposed workaround to add one of the woman / man with the other sexe would not be hidden in all situations. At least my guess is that the background color in the charts would be wrong.

 

But agree with you that the presentation as you mention at the end of your post is a nice workaround really presenting the situation as it is. So I repeat my request: why no standard tag (and applicable narrative wording) for these situations. Adoptions are brought automatically into the right Family sub-header don't they?

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

 

 

Peter, I am a family historian, as I assume you are as well. And TMG is very powerful. But that doesn't change the fact that it follows bloodlines, and you are trying to put in a non bloodline event. You can add as many custom tags (even in the birth group) as you want to explain the situation. I would say there aren't any standard ones because we all treat it differently. Some want the children to show as if these two ladies were their biological parents. Some just want a note tag explaining the situation, some want to ignore the whole issue altogether. As you say, situations vary wildly. TMG allows you to do all three. Granted it's a lot harder to show than an adoption or foster child, because as you point out, charts would have the wrong accent colors (which you could manually change).

I have no idea why no standard tag, except for when TMG was written in 1990s, this was not a legal practice? That's just a guess on my part. Thing is, you can create the tag now, and it will be in your project for ever more. Add it the sentence forum and others can borrow it.

 

The truth is that woman A) had three children with Man no matter how that came about. She then married woman C, and together they are raising children D, E, and F.

 

Create a Birth tag for each child showing them with birth mother A and birth father B (name him whatever you want). Then create a new custom tag in the marriage group and use it to marry woman C. Then using the ChildrenOf tag create a sentence that reads:

 

The following children were raised by Woman A and Woman C:

 

Child D

Child E

Child F

 

 

You'll get a listing showing that woman A and man B are the birth parents of the three children, and then another listing of Woman A and Woman B being the raising parents of the three children. That should work, and it tells the whole truth.

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

Yes, you can create custom tags and that is the power of TMG but ... custom tags have to be maintained over time in new releases by myself I fear.

Perhaps I can set your mind somewhat at ease. In the about 15 years I have been using TMG the company/author has made a point to do everything they can to avoid destroying user data, and to ensure that a new version will automatically bring forward both old data and customizations. There may be a requirement, like there was when going from Version 6 to Version 7, to take specific steps to automatically convert your dataset from the old version to the new. However, historically with this program I feel safe to say that any custom tags you create in a dataset will be retained in some manner in future versions. I certainly hope so, as I am someone who has created a lot of custom tags. In fact, I believe that there are very few tags that I use that are "standard" or with their default sentences/definitions. I don't find that odd or inappropriate because I firmly believe that the very essence of genealogy is personal, and the documentation and ultimate narration should be able to reflect that. In my opinion the "standard" tags are simply a way to get started and be used for the simple and basic data and events. But their real purpose is simply as "starting points" or "examples" for the user to customize the tags, sentences, and narratives that they personally need and want to use.

 

Just my opinion

 

 

Michael,

Well we both know I am big on custom tags, so I think I would have you beat. We users are in good hands. If Peter creates his custom tags, they won't go anywhere. Even the "standard" tags can be edited and changed. I doubt that two people looking at TMG the way it ships and on my screen would recognize the same program :lol But that's what endears us to it so much. Peter can have his custom tags to add the children of two women as if they were the biological children. The rest of us don't have to do so. I can link my grandmother's stepchildren, whom she raised from ages 2, 4 and 8 as biological children, but not my grandfather's whose mother he married when they were in their late fifties. Or I can follow strict bloodlines and just have a note (love that ChildrenOf...) about each situation.

 

We all get our cake and get to eat it too!

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

Perhaps I can set your mind somewhat at ease. In the about 15 years I have been using TMG the company/author has made a point to do everything they can to avoid destroying user data, and to ensure that a new version will automatically bring forward both old data and customizations. There may be a requirement, like there was when going from Version 6 to Version 7, to take specific steps to automatically convert your dataset from the old version to the new. However, historically with this program I feel safe to say that any custom tags you create in a dataset will be retained in some manner in future versions. I certainly hope so, as I am someone who has created a lot of custom tags.

 

Thanks for setting my mind at ease at this point.

 

In fact, I believe that there are very few tags that I use that are "standard" or with their default sentences/definitions. I don't find that odd or inappropriate because I firmly believe that the very essence of genealogy is personal, and the documentation and ultimate narration should be able to reflect that. In my opinion the "standard" tags are simply a way to get started and be used for the simple and basic data and events. But their real purpose is simply as "starting points" or "examples" for the user to customize the tags, sentences, and narratives that they personally need and want to use.

 

 

The sentence above about

 

`I firmly believe the very essence of genealogy is personal, and the documentation and ultimate narration should be able to reflect that.`

 

 

is a neat assesment to measure genelogy applications against.

 

It surely seems to have tipped my thinking about my previous `we need standard tags ...` ( for the time being). But a Same Sex Marriage construct to start working from would still be nice.

 

OK time to start experimenting with the previous hints (and perhaps variants of the adoption tag).

 

Thanks once again.

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[M.P. van Dobben de Bruijn 0]

Situation (is in this specific case) as follows:

 

- two woman never married before have a long-lasting relationship between themselves.

- they decide to have a child and an unknown spermdonor and AI makes 'it' (the twins) happen

 

(to complicate matters)

 

- long afterthe children are born into their relationship they marry as the laws for that are only passed shortly before their marriage (and after the children are born).

 

I put the marriage into their record and the children are as Child-Bio in the biologicals mothers record as well as Child-Oth in the record of the second mother.

 

Now I get (mind you: this is Second Site narrative output for a person in indented style, but that is based on TMG constructs I understood)

 

-----

 

 

Biological Mother

 

born

marriage

 

Family 1

 

- empty space because of the father being unknown

 

Children

 

- twin 1

- twin 2

 

Family 2

 

- name of second mother

 

 

-----

 

Second Mother

 

born

marriage

 

Family

 

name of the biological mother of "their" children but the children are not there.

 

 

--------

 

As nothing is shown about the children into their marriage (Family 2 at the second mother and Family

without a number as it is the only one for the "second" mother) I have a problem finding how to put remarks and links to the twins there easily and maintenable.

 

Perhaps easiest would be to put a specific HTML-construct into the narrative field for the marriage between the two women?

 

Something like as proposed above but then in HTML (copied over from the biological parents) in the custom-sentence section of the Marriage tag?

 

That way the "bloodlines" approach would stay intact for the charts and I would get the children with specific remarks about being born and raised in the relationship between the two parents on the (narrative) parents pages I suppose. Only thing then is that the children's own pages show only the biological mother I guess or I would need to put a special HTML construct in those tags to (but that special construct would then show up at the biological mothers page in the "family" - there was never one with the AI-donor of course - section for the biological parents).

 

BTW I seem to remember a Co-Parent tag being mentioned somewhere in the help but seem not to find it now.

 

Perhaps I am making it to complex that Co-Parent tag is an easy way to get the presentation I want without <g> "lying" and wihtout custom tags being necessary?

 

Did not understand or find the `ChildrenOf` tag remark. is it standard or should I create it myself?

 

kindest regards

from Leeuwarden, NL

Peter van Dobben de Bruijn

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

Peter,

 

IT is a standard tag called NarrativeChild. Sorry to confuse you, I was reading Terry's page http://tmg.reigelridge.com/NarrativeChildren.htm which explains it better.

 

In the journal report it replaces the old "The child of X and Y are as follows:"

 

In other reports and SS it is just a standard tag. But you can sort it so that it will print where you want it to. I haven't worked with it alot, but I think it will work for you fine. If you want to remove the father from the narrative altogether, then just make the birth mother the primary parent, and have no other primary. I'd leave the birth father, and explain in the notes what you told use.

THe create a Narrative Child that looked exactly like the other output and use it for both of the mothers. It might take some playing with it, but I think you can make it work in a way that will please all parties, be totally honest about the situation, especially since the children predate the marriage of the two women.

 

But please DON'T be afraid of using Custom tags. You won't have to do anything special when you upgrade to keep them. I have hundreds with large sentences and tons of roles. They allow you great freedom in personalizing your TMG to your family and allow TMG to grow with you.

[Terry Reigel 0]

As nothing is shown about the children into their marriage (Family 2 at the second mother and Family

without a number as it is the only one for the "second" mother) I have a problem finding how to put remarks and links to the twins there easily and maintenable.

I suspect that's because the Mother-Other tag isn't primary for the children. And, it can't be made primary because you have her sex shown as F - TMG doesn't allow children to have two primary parents of the same sex - that was one of the issues I was talking about in my earlier post in this thread.

Perhaps easiest would be to put a specific HTML-construct into the narrative field for the marriage between the two women?

You could get what you want to print, most likely, but no matter what you did there you would also still have the families with misplaced children as you describe above. I think that would be even more confusing because you would end up with three "families" and the children would appear twice. You might be able to fix that by having no primary Mother tags for the children, but then there would be no parents shown in the children's section.

[Terry Reigel 0]

In other reports and SS it is just a standard tag. But you can sort it so that it will print where you want it to. I haven't worked with it alot, but I think it will work for you fine.

 

I really don't think it will help. The NarrativeChildren tag is not recognized by Second Site, so it will appear as plan text with no list of children, and the present Family 1, Family 2 sections will remain unchanged.

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

My suggestion was to make the text in the NarrativeChildren tag look as closely to the text provided by SS elsewhere when children were listed. It would probably require some post editing to get it spaced correctly on the screen.

 

Like:

 

The children of Rebecca and Susan are as follows:

 

Samantha Jane

James Allen

John Aubrey

[retsof 0]

Gay/lesbian is only one concern. At least descendants would be adopted.

 

I don't have any polygamous or polandric or communal situations either, but suppose that it would be possible for some situations with more than one wife/husband. I was wondering how to number the individuals uniquely (reference number), should the situation ever come up.

Edited May 6, 2008 by retsof

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

I don't use a special number to number people. Let TMG do that based on the report and the starting person. My reference number if for their place in the family cemetery.

 

I would just record each marriage as it happened, each kid as it happened, and let the families lay where they fall, so to speak.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Peter,

 

If you had not noticed, there is a separate forum just for users to describe their custom tags and custom sentences. I have just posted my custom way of dealing with Adoption which you may find you can adapt to your situation.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,