Family

The second important entity is the family. It links individuals and is handled as a separate entity to allow for cases, where one or even both spouses are unknown.

When creating an entity by clicking on GenJ asks for some key information. Then you can specify a relationship to another entity in your file. Simply click on an individual in the Tree View or Table View and you can choose from the radiobuttons: that individual is either a parent or child (only if not already child in another family) in this family. Make your selection and click on Create.

When editing a Family in the Edit View you should stick to the Gedcom standard as close as possible. A typical family could consists of this kind of information:

@F001@ FAM
 WIFE @I002@
 HUSB @I001@
 MARR
  DATE 1964
  PLAC Flagstaff, USA
 CHIL @I004@
 CHIL @I005@
 CHIL @I008@

Just work through the properties of your families and change their properties. When adding new properties choose from the predefined list or if necessary extend the schema by adding new property-tags for special user-properties.

An important feature of Gedcom is the capability to link entities. Families are normally not separate - they have a husband, wife or children. Everytime you create a new Family connected to individuals, they are linked through properties. These properties for the families are HUSB (the husband), WIFE (the wife) or CHIL (the child). The properties refer to the individual by its id. You can explore the relationship between families and individuals by following those links. Be careful when deleting or creating new links - keeping the overview of the referential integrity is not easy :).

Again the example from the section about the Individual: You have your family tree and found out that an ancestors wife's sister married his brother. All those individuals are in your tree already! You can now create a new family for this newly discovered relationship. But then you don't want to create a new individual - you want to link existing entities! The solution: Select the new family for your ancestor's brother and add a WIFE property to it. Then change it to point to the sister by entering her ID. Click on the link-button and a FAMS property will automatically be added to the sister pointing back. The circle is made.