Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 11:07 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (guest, #20463)
In reply to: Genealogy research with Gramps by TomH
Parent article: Genealogy research with Gramps

> You can certainly create a family with two parents of the same sex,
> because I've done it. It may be that the interface currently labels one
> as "mother" and one as "father" but there's certainly no problem making
> those refer to people of the same sex.

I don't quite understand this. Yes, of course, somebodies legal parents can be of the same sex, but usually this isn't biological. I mean it's GENEalogy. Or can this actually be done, children with genetic material of both same-sex legal parents?

Speaking of which, how does Gramps cope with bastards?

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 11:18 UTC (Thu) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link] (7 responses)

The point is that a "family" is Gramps currently links two parents (one of which is labelled "mother" in the UI and the other is labelled "father" in the UI) to a list of children. There is also a relationship type (which has some predefined values like "married" but can be set to anything you like).

There is nothing stopping you assigning a male person to the "mother" slot or a female person to the "father" slot however, so that is how same sex relationships are normally handled at present. As I said there has been some talk of changing how those parents are labelled.

Each child in a family has fields for "relationship to father" and "relationship to father" which have predefined values like "birth", "adopted", "fostered" etc but again you can actually type in anything you like.

A bastard can simply be entered by creating a family with only one parent and assigning the child to it. If the second parent is known they can be assigned to the family but the family type set to "unmarried".

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 20:24 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

It is true that a person has two biological parents of opposite gender, who may or may not be known. They can have one or more legal parents of any gender. It seems a little restrictive to have only two fields.

Genealogy is the study of family history and so while biological parents are important, legal parentage is also important and shouldn't be ignored.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 0:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (4 responses)

while biological parents are important, legal parentage is also important and shouldn't be ignored

I would think social parentage is even more interesting that legal parentage. The fact that a person raised another person matters more to many people than the various things that legal parenthood signifies.

And there's no reason that relationship should be limited to one or two people.

They can have one or more legal parents of any gender

Is there any place where a person can have more than two legal parents?

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 0:32 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

Is there any place where a person can have more than two legal parents?

California has recently made it possible for someone to have more than two legal parents.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 1:07 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

not to mention that someone may have more legal parents over time, and as you are researching, it may not always be clear what the overlap for individuals is.

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Aug 18, 2014 21:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Add to that, in the UK at least, legal adoption is very much a 20th-century practice. (And I think there is no limit to the number of adoptive parents a child can have. Plus, kids can be left in a will...)

I don't know whether legal adoption even existed before that, but it was very much the norm, if the wife died, any kids were given away (to family members if they were around, or to various charities if they weren't).

And quite often, if family circumstances changed, children that had been given away were taken back.

I suspect I'm quite lucky to know my family because, even then (back in the thirties) that practice was quite common, and my grandmother died when my father was two years old. Granddad remarried within the year, though, iirc, so that may have had something to do with it ...

Cheers,
Wol

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 19, 2014 3:04 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Lots of countries practice polygamy. Then there are adoptions - it's possible for someone to be orphaned and then adopted (possibly several times).

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Aug 3, 2014 15:26 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

A child and parents can be members of multiple "families" in Gramps, which covers for some of those use cases (although sometimes it would clearly be & look like a workaround/kludge...).

Genealogy research with Gramps

Posted Jul 17, 2014 19:00 UTC (Thu) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link]

I wondered about whether genealogy was about genes. But I think that lots of people want to record adoptive family, among other things.

As for types of biological parentage:

Gestational surrogacy, where a baby is borne by someone other than the people who provided sperm and egg. Pregnancy even affects the mother's DNA.
A third parent can provide mitochondrial DNA to avoid a rare disease.
You might consider someone who regularly breastfeeds a child as a biological relation. They certainly transmit protective antibodies. Science doesn't have a full understanding of everything that breastfeeding does. Milk kinship is an idea in some cultures and it may have biological kinship effects.
There may be more types of biological parentage in the future - science is active in this area.