Does Version 3. Allow For Adoptions?

[Fridolin]

Hi Pete, thanks for the test file.

I opened it up and AB says "11 persons" (which should be wrong) and shows 6 children for A.B. and Mr. D. So, there's definitely something wrong.

I take a closer look:
- P. C. and P. D. are two different persons who only have one name each;
- P. C. has 7 siblings (which is definitely wrong) and two pairs of parents (among them one mother twice - no idea if that's good or not)
- Q. C. only shows up as child of A.B. and Mr. C., because he has only one pair of parents
...

I then try to get the family situation right:
1. Delete P. D., Q. D., R. D. (they already exist as children of Mr. C) - if I delete them as children of Mr D, I only lose the connection to their parents, they still exist as persons - you have to search them and delete them as person to purge the family file;
2. Change to Q. C. and R. C. and add an adoptive father Mr. D;
3. Add a second name for the three adopted boys: Add name fact, select "adoptive" type, enter D., P. etc. and check "main name"; get to the other name fact and select the type "Birth name".

Within the navigator, the result doesn't look as sweet as before, as the couple A.B. and Mr. C. seems to have 3 boys named D., but the family structure now is correct. Looks like the navigator always shows the "main name" and you have to decide which one has priority for the charts.

There still are places within the software where the # of children is counted in a wrong way:
- if I enter A. B. as partner of adoptive father Mr. D., I get an existing person A. B. proposed as mother who has 6 children (she doesn't);
- the siblings P.D., Q.D. and R.D. now show up twice in the Parents/Siblings tab, so e.g. T. D. has 7 brothers; that's irritating, and they even aren't listed next to each other; would be nice if @Dirk could do something at this point.
At least, the number of children in the navigator is correct.

You now just would have to add birth dates and re-sort the children so that the order gets correct. At the moment, the very first children of A.B. and Mr. D. are S. and T. - which isn't really correct, if age should count more than blood... (but who knows - I haven't seen the last will of Mr. D.)

B.t.w.: I opted for D. as family name of the adopted boys, but that's not the way we are wanted to do it. The software gives the decision up to you, and you can check any last name as "main name". There is only one thing to take care of: Don't set a second name which isn't a full name (last, first name), always take a set of both - only if a person really has only one name ("Sting" as artist name or the like), the GEDCOM standard would demand to leave one of those two open (but is "Sting" a first or a last name? "Adele" is clearer).

You might want to play around with the double mother. But this is complicated, as every child has a pair of parents: The adoptive boys would then show up in the navigator as the children of Mr. D and his second wife "unknown" of of Mr. C and his second wife "unknown", if you delete one of the two natural mothers A.B. (who are the same person, though).

I've attached the "corrected" family test file - in GEDCOM format.

[PeteC]

Fridolin,
I don't know what I did wrong but I was trying to change P,Q, and R to birth name C and keep it C even when selecting Mr D since that is analogous to the wife still displaying B even though she would be called AC after the first marriage and AD after the second.

But something went haywire. The AdoptionTest 2.ahn displays that way but somehow QC has two Birth names and "main name" check box cannot be changed. See TwoBirthNames.jpg. The same is true for RC.

I think I was able to check the "main name" for PC but not Q and R.
???

Wait. It seems that if I have selected the first "Name" row (row 2) I can rename it to any item in the Type drop down menu but the change doesn't take place until I close the window and open it again.

[Fridolin]

Hi Steve,

from the corrected file I sent you back, you didn't have to change anything on the persons' data - you just have to set the "preferred name" by checking the case on the desired name fact. C was already the birthname of the boys. It just wasn't the preferred name to display ("main name"). So you don't have to change the name type if you want P.D. to be displayed as P.C. - just check the "main name" case.

It might be confusing in the first place that you can only check the case on a name where it isn't already checked. But in reality, that makes sense, too.

[Fridolin]

Do you think that is how the developers of AH wanted it?

By the way, there is only one developer at Ahnenblatt: Dirk Böttcher who started it as a spare time project about 20 years ago. He's employed as a programmer somewhere. I admire his perseverance, though.

There's a remarkable market for genealogic online platforms where you have to share your data. But the Ahnenblatt sort of software where you are free to do what you want and your data remains yours doesn't seem to be a big deal.

Indeed, in AB 3.x it's your own choice if a person has two names of birth - you can do almost anything you might need to. And it's up to you if you want to run the integrity check or not.

[PeteC]

Fridolin,

I was just too dense to realize that the fields at the bottom (Type, Birth name, First names) were going to feed their values into the "Name" row that was selected. I thought that when I selected Type=adoptive, the names would go into the row Name(adoptive name). I didn't notice that the Type selected would change the (xxx) to what ever Type I selected from the drop down.

That is why, when I discovered PC had two "birth" names I thought I had bombed things.

Now that I understand how it works (I hope) I should be OK.

Thanks for straightening me out.

Pete

[Fridolin]

You're welcome! Glad I could help you.