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[Judsi 0]

I am trying to type in information from obituaries that list a deceased person's siblings but parents' names are unknown in there. When I start to add the person under sister or brother, I get a window that tells me that no parents are listed. How do I fix this so that I can add the siblings without knowing the parents' names? Thank you.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi Judsi,

 

The definition of the term siblings is that they share at least one parent. The only "relationship" connection that exists for TMG people is Parent/Child. Some other genealogy programs "pretend" that they have defined a "sibling" relationship, but what they do is create a "dummy" parent that you can't/don't see and still just link each of the siblings with a parent/child relationship to this dummy parent.

 

There are two typical ways to reflect this sibling relationship in TMG.

 

What seems to be the most complete way, and used by most of us users, is to add the parent yourself and link all the siblings to that parent. While you don't know anything about this parent, in most patrinomic societies you can at least guess the surname of the father. Thus in TMG you can add a person, whose only information is his surname, and link all the siblings as children of that person. You might want to use the TMG "-Oth" relationship to remind you that you know very little about this parent. Actually in these cases I usually add a Birth tag for the father with a date of "circa" 25 years earlier than the youngest sibling. I assign the father my custom "Presume" role on this Birth tag to produce a sentence something like "He is presumed to have been born circa 1840 to be about age 25 at the time of the birth of his youngest child." But that is just my way of distinguising between multiple such parent people I have added in the database who only have a surname. Other users use different methods.

 

The second, less complete, way I have heard from other users is to use a custom "Sibling" tag. Some users suggest creating this custom tag type in the "History" group so that there is no Principal, only Witnesses. In that way all the siblings are added as Witnesses to this one tag. A custom "Male" sentence might be "[W] was reported to be the brother of [WO]", and an equivlanent Female sentence. However, this way does not link these people in any way that a relationship can be calcualted or shown other than through the narrative sentence of this custom tag.

 

Hope this gives you ideas.

[Judsi 0]

Hi Judsi,

 

The definition of the term siblings is that they share at least one parent. The only "relationship" connection that exists for TMG people is Parent/Child. Some other genealogy programs "pretend" that they have defined a "sibling" relationship, but what they do is create a "dummy" parent that you can't/don't see and still just link each of the siblings with a parent/child relationship to this dummy parent.

 

There are two typical ways to reflect this sibling relationship in TMG.

 

What seems to be the most complete way, and used by most of us users, is to add the parent yourself and link all the siblings to that parent. While you don't know anything about this parent, in most patrinomic societies you can at least guess the surname of the father. Thus in TMG you can add a person, whose only information is his surname, and link all the siblings as children of that person. You might want to use the TMG "-Oth" relationship to remind you that you know very little about this parent. Actually in these cases I usually add a Birth tag for the father with a date of "circa" 25 years earlier than the youngest sibling. I assign the father my custom "Presume" role on this Birth tag to produce a sentence something like "He is presumed to have been born circa 1840 to be about age 25 at the time of the birth of his youngest child." But that is just my way of distinguising between multiple such parent people I have added in the database who only have a surname. Other users use different methods.

 

The second, less complete, way I have heard from other users is to use a custom "Sibling" tag. Some users suggest creating this custom tag type in the "History" group so that there is no Principal, only Witnesses. In that way all the siblings are added as Witnesses to this one tag. A custom "Male" sentence might be "[W] was reported to be the brother of [WO]", and an equivlanent Female sentence. However, this way does not link these people in any way that a relationship can be calcualted or shown other than through the narrative sentence of this custom tag.

 

Hope this gives you ideas.

 

Thank you for your great answer. Never thought about the surname. Usually if I don't know the full name either first or last, I add the word 'unknown' + the first or last name. I am a simple detailed person, I don't like complicated programs, this is the easiest way. So what you have said makes good sense.

 

Thank you very much.

Edited April 6, 2010 by Judsi

[Michael Hannah 0]

You are most welcome. Glad it will work for you.