Anyone who has spent any time doing research in medieval genealogy knows that parentage is being changed constantly as new documents, land descents, and the like, and discovered. Many persons thought not to have had children turn out to have been the parents of children whose parents were previously unknown or incorrectly linked to person(s) who were not parents.
For those who deal with more recent times may not have this problem, but the endeavor is ongoing in earlier centuries. And these "errors" are among the aristocracy, among persons for whom there is much legal, judicial, and royal evidence. Luckily for history and genealogy, researchers did not take someone else's word for it and move on. If you are at all familiar with the era, corrections and additions to Complete Peerage (14 vols), the epitome of reliable secondary sources, are constantly being made because research kept researching. CE From: geoffbr...@juno.com Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 13:40:07 +0000 To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] marriages To me genealogy is all about connecting people. The software is just a tool to make it easier. Most people have one set of parents; some people have more than one father and/or mother due to adoption or other reasons, but in researching there is always at least the hope of finding at least one father and mother and extending the connection back an additional generation and the software allows for that. The question is can you connect someone forward to another person by marriage or parenthood? Having a “stop looking” sign because the researcher has done an exhaustive search and is satisfied that the person was never married and because the researcher is satisfied that the person had no children is helpful, just as it is helpful to document that if they were married and they had no children. To me these are just signals to stop looking at trying to extend that line by marriage or parenthood. Now, if someone has a child, from a genealogy software perspective, it seems only nature that the system is going to allow for that child to have at least one set of parents. If the known man and woman that produced this child were not married then I just check the box that says “This couple did not marry.” To me that is just an indication to not look for a marriage record and to move on. ---------- Original Message ---------- From: Ronald Bernier <ronaldbern...@bernfrin.org> To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] marriages Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 10:00:01 +0000 But it does seem to be a huge deal to you. Sent from my iPhone On Jun 24, 2013, at 10:13 PM, "Pat Hickin" <pph...@gmail.com> wrote: Shingals wrote "We none of us can ever *absolutely prove* any fact. Whatmakes this one require special treatment?" I realize that most facts are not absolutely 100% provable, but we all know that zillions of people have had children out of wedlock. That men may not necessarily even know whether they've produced offspring. I just think there should be a way to say (on the individual screen) that an individual never married without also having to make a statement about offspring. That's all I'm asking for. To me it seems utterly reasonable. It really does not seem such a big deal to me! Pat Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyusers.com/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyfamilytree.com/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
