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.
2 Responses
Is there any genealogy program that has any spot where it can be noted that everyone in the census is not the child of both adults? At ancestry the choice in order to add the whole census is to accept the female or male as the child’s parent when in fact half the time they are not. The only work around that I can think of is to add each census to only that child and not indicate who the parents are. PITA
And how do we document negative step-parenting? I have examples of that.