On 22 Apr 2006 at 18:21, John R. Bayle wrote: > Steve wrote: > > > > In Massachusetts, marriage between same sex couples is legal and thus > good > > > genealogy. > > > >Bad biology. > > > >Of course when cloning *really* gets going, that may change, but I doubt > that > >it will make for better genealogy. > > > >I'd records such an event as a "Domestic Partnership" under events. > > Not only is it legal for same sex couples to marry in Mass, they may also > adopt children in Mass and in other states. The fact that one can record > adoptions in Legacy and in other Genie programs demonstrates that Genealogy is > NOT just about blood lines or good or bad biology. Whether we like gay > marriages and adoptions or not is really beside the issue IMO. In some states > gays may have "Domestic Partnerships", but in Massachusetts they have > "Marriages". They are not partnerships of any kind. That was/is the whole > point! So the program should allow for recording both Domestic Partnerships > and Marriages and should not insist that the sexes in these relationships be > different.
> > They are legal facts of life today. And polygamy has been and is practiced in > various places and various times, whether legal or not. So to actually record > the history as it really happened genie programs should allow the factual > honest recording of all these variants. The program should attempt to record > what actually happend without making jugements about goodness, badness, who > cares ness! As Jack Webb used to say on Dragnet: The genealogical facts are, however, not concerned with marriage at all, whether the relationship is legal or not. The program I use for initial data entry, Family History System (FHS), is a bit more sensible than Legacy (and most other genealogy programs) in this respect -- in entering data, the primary relationships are father-child and mother-child. And that is what one enters. It is possible to enter whether the parents were married, but the program itself makes no assumptions about that. One result of this is that is that if I ask FHS to print a family group sheet of the children of one person, in prints all the children of that person, born of any marriage or none, and also prints the other parents, if known, whether married or not. When, however, I export a GEDCOM file to import into Legacy, or elsewhere), it creates "marriages", because that is something bult into GEDCOM, which was designed by the designers of PAF, and in PAF, in order to enter children, you have to have a "family" -- you cannot add a child to a single parent. This design feature of PAF has influenced other programs, including Legacy, though Legacy is not quite so strict about it. I prefer5 the FHS design philosophy of treating the main genealogical relationship as "parent child". But for Legacy to do that would require a major design overhaul. The genealogical facts are where your genes and chromosomes come from. Marriage is iseful to genealogogists because records have been kept, so making it easier to trace parentatge, but parentage, not marriage, is the eddential genealogical fact. Of course family history is wider than mere genealogy, but if one is going to include homosexual marriages or other domestic partnerships, why not make provision for entering friends, teachers, employers and other influential persons in a person's life, and allow the marriage field to indicate those relationships too? I'd like to see a program that does that, a kind of "six degrees" program, which could be very useful for biographers and historians, but such a thing goes well beyond Legacy. If Millennia bring out such a program, I'd be interested in usuing it, but I would still want a genealogy program like Legacy for genealogy. -- Steve Hayes E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm Phone: 083-342-3563 or 012-333-6727 Enter the drawing for a FREE Legacy Cruise to Alaska or a FREE research trip to Salt Lake's Family History Library. Open to users of Legacy 6 Deluxe. Enter online at http://legacyfamilytree.com/FreeTrip.asp Legacy User Group guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ For online technical support, please visit http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/Help.asp To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp
