Relationships with Step-Parents

I posted this a while back to the “group” page for Tip of the Day in response to a question about step-parents  and their relationships with children by their spouse’s previous marriages and thought it made for a good tip:

Explain the biological and “relationship by marriage” relationships clearly. It’s fine to indicate if a subsequent spouse of an ancestor served as the parent of the children in ways that are crucial, life-lasting, and important to that child’s development and relationships. Just make sure that the biological and non-biological aspects are clear so that later DNA tests are not needlessly confusing. If that subsequent spouse was influential in the life of the child, document it and record it. Those are things that tend to get lost as time moves on.

Don’t do this for a family in the 1820s if you have no evidence to indicate what really happened after the second, third, etc. marriage. Writing down speculation can sometimes make it turn into fact.