>Unlinking the children from the unknown parents is not a good fix, for >if there are two or more children in the family then they will no >longer be shown to be siblings. A better fix is to highlight one of >the children and add a father parent to the family. The father's >surname will most likely be the same as the children and that's all >the information you really need to have a parent record entered in FO >to tie the siblings together. (FO works better if you have a real >parent entered.) It's not common, but the same situation can arise out of your own personal research, not just with imported GEDCOM. You might discover that two men were brothers and yet not have a clue as to their parents' names. For example, John Doe might have kept a journal where he spoke of his brother James, and yet you might not know who their parents were. The solution is the same -- enter a set of dummy parents. Styles vary on what names to use. In this case, I try to use the brothers' surname as the father's surname (not always correct, of course) and I leave the given name blank. Other researchers will put "Unknown" or "UNK" or something like that as the given name. I prefer to minimize the use of "unknown" and I like to just leave data blank when I don't know what it is. Styles vary a lot between researchers. For the mother's name, I would prefer leaving both surname and given name blank, but Family Origins won't let me. So I leave the surname blank and put "unknown" as the given name. (I also don't like leaving the mother "null", where there are pointers to a phantom.) I find that I am often able to fill in the father's complete name or the mother's complete name some weeks or months later. One last complication ought to be mentioned. It's certainly possible that siblings with unknown parents were half-siblings, having only a single parent in common. The way I propose implementing dummy parents suggests that the siblings were full-siblings. If you know that they were half-siblings, then you can enter a common mother and separate fathers or vice versa, as appropriate. But if you don't know, I would just enter one dummy father and one dummy mother, pending further research. Jerry Bryan _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 3 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus&xAPID=42&PS=47575&PI=7324&DI=7474&SU= http://www.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/getmsg&HL=1216hotmailtaglines_virusprotection_3mf