Sherry/Support wrote:
This is what Ken wrote to the list 28 Feb 2003:
Thanks for supplying that response. I don't recall ever seeing it, so perhaps it was from a time when I was not subscribed.
... right now it's not feasible without an entire re-design of our Legacy database structure or we would penalize a huge percentage of our users with huge speed consequences. ... would require considerable programming time and would rip the guts out a huge percentage of our core code base. Right now for those who do wish to record same sex marriages can do so with the work-arounds that have been suggested.
I have a great deal of difficulty reconciling the first two of those statements with the third one. If we can simply change one character in the database to achieve the desired results, why can't Legacy simply let us do that change within Legacy? What in the world could cause huge speed consequences and require so much programming? That's a puzzle that isn't quite obvious!
I know that some same sex marriages adopt children and their descendant tree continues and needs to be recorded but most of these marriages are in recent years and the majority of individuals involved with doing genealogy are tracing ancestors and once you get back a generation there are not very many same sex marriages that need to be recorded.
Ah, but we are gathering our data for the benefit of future generations. The more information we enter about the present, or the recent past, the less trouble future generations will have trying to put together the structure of all their ancestors and relatives. That is especially true for same-sex relationships, which will not be well documented in the typical official records that are used by genealogists. Accurate information may exist only in records kept by the families involved. Anyone who has hundreds or thousands of families in their database should have a number of same-sex couples among them. If not, it is either because they have not come across the information yet, or because they do not want to record it.
I'm not a programmer...
I am, but believe me in this case it doesn't help to understand the situation!!! Luckily for me, I don't have a big problem with this issue. A few years ago, while following an obscure branch of the family (in-laws of in-laws, or some such), I ran across an obituary that mentioned a surviving partner. I am of the philosophy that every name discovered that can be linked to existing individuals should be entered into the database, and I was rather shocked that Legacy did not allow me to do so. In this case I simply did not enter the partner, since the name was at least contained within the text of the obituary. However, I am anticipating that I will someday run across more cases like this, and possibly of closer relatives, and I would certainly like them to exist as individuals rather than just text.
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